


the land of tears

by lairdofthelochs



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Also this isn't Tommy/Gibson in the strictest, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, More of a reincarnation/time-travel sort of fic, Philippe Hugo Guillet - Freeform, Slow Burn, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 08:34:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12128613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lairdofthelochs/pseuds/lairdofthelochs
Summary: Great-uncle Tommy was a war hero, and Tom – well, Tom was a nobody. 'Gibson' was only supposed to exist within the pages of his great-uncle's diaries-- until 'Gibson' materialized in front of Tom, on that fateful summer night in Dover.





	1. the beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this while listening to a lot of Florence and the Machine, and heavily inspired by a brief conversation with Elamae and wellclutchmypearls -- I just started writing and couldn't stop. I would also like to thank Aneurin Barnard for providing us with Gibson's name. Title taken from The Little Prince. Apologies for the imperfect French, please let me know if anything's inaccurate and I will fix it!

Tom couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the sea this up close.

It might have been years ago, when his dad was still alive and his mom hadn't been popping pills to help retain her sanity. He had let out a gasp when he first saw the white cliffs, before pulling Claire closer in his arms, smelling the scent of Satsuma shampoo on her dirty blonde hair. That had been three days ago.

Now he was left stranded in Dover, alone and in despair.

How did he get here?

His mom had phoned, wondering where he was. He hadn't even told her where he was going. He was giddy, a boy in love, a boy in lust. When Claire had proposed that they did something crazy, it had appealed to his impulsive nature. They'd taken the first train out of London, had lodged at a nearby hostel near the cliffs— stark white against the harsh grey of the sea and the skies.

It was perfect.

Now, he could have chased after Claire, but he didn't. He couldn’t even remember what they had argued about. He looked at his phone, three more missed calls from his mom; seven texts and _WhatsApp_ messages pleading him to come home. He could have packed up and returned to Tooting, but he'd decided to stay another night, to nurse his wounded pride. He'd sat at the pier and watched the waves crash against the rocks— severe and unrelenting.

In this light, he thought he could see France, forever away.

His great-uncle was stranded there, once. A Dunkirk survivor. Gran used to tell tales about it. Kept telling him how much he looked like her brother Tommy. He was long dead now, in the war. Tom had never met him, but there were keepsakes. Photos, letters, diaries.  Tom thought he _really_ looked like his great-uncle Tommy, but what use did it serve but to draw up unfair comparisons?

Great-uncle Tommy was a war hero, and Tom – well, Tom was a _nobody._

The sun was setting, now. He was about to leave when he saw a piece of metal getting stuck between the decaying wooden planks. His hand reached within the foamy, salty waters and pulled the metal out amidst the sand and the seaweed.

It was pair of dogtags.

 _Gibson, B,_ it read. The name had a familiar ring to it, but Tom thought nothing of it. He dried them against his jeans and tucked it in his pocket, before going back inland.

A raven sat atop the metal railings, as if keenly watching Tom’s every movement. The raven squawked and didn’t flinch as he approached closer. Tom spared a brief glance at the bird before making his way inland, where he’d decided to drown his sorrows at a nearby pub.

When Tom turned back to stare at the sea, the raven had flown away.

 

* * *

 

Trouble seemed to be his only friend today.

A group of drunken blokes were attempting to chat up a lady and her friend, and it was clear that their advances were making the women uncomfortable. They had tried to be polite in saying no, but the men were persistent. From their accents, Tom had gathered that they were probably European tourists – Spanish, Portuguese, maybe. It wasn’t long before the men became cruder, more offensive. No one seemed to be lending a hand, so it was probably Dutch courage that led Tom to stand up and pick a fight. They all had to be more than six feet tall, in comparison to Tom's small frame.

It was a losing battle.

When they hauled him out of the pub, kicking and punching his gut, Tom thought that this would be where he'd meet his end. They’d taken his wallet off him, read his name from his driving licence out loud before hurling it into the sea. They’d taunted him with his phone, threatening that they would throw that away, too. Another bloke pulled out the dogtags from his pocket and threw it on the ground with a clink.

It fell right in front of Tom’s head, sandwiched right between the concrete and one of the hooligan’s filthy Nike trainer. Mouth spurting out blood and spit, undignified. The bruises won’t look pretty tomorrow.

If there was a tomorrow.

 _"Arretez,"_ a voice suddenly came from behind them.

The men turned to look at the intruder, and burst out laughing. "What do we have here, some soldier boy playing dress-up?" The pressure against his head was gone, but Tom’s ears were still ringing. He was still bleary-eyed, but he'd managed to turn his head and saw a man dressed in full military gear. His army-green dungarees were dripping wet, making him look as though he was dressed in black. His eyes pierced sharply in the moonlight, first staring down the men mercilessly, before his gaze flickered towards Tom. As if he was genuinely worried.

Tom thought he looked like an ethereal creature only arisen from the sea, like a selkie who had just shed his skin.

An undine.

The soldier didn't reply to the men’s rancorous insults. He merely took one step forward, boots clipping against the tarmac, echoing dimly in the summer night. In one hand he was holding Tom's wallet, as if he'd helped retrieved it from underwater. In his other hand was a rifle, gripped tightly within ashen knuckles. A rifle he was prepared to use, if the men refused to budge.

He inched closer, step by step, leaving rivulets of water on the ground in his steady approach. He lifted the rifle without hesitation and aimed it at the men. In Tom's mind, he could easily imagine dark wings unfurling between the soldier's shoulder blades. As dark as his hair, the grim expression he was wearing— like a vision of Azrael, the Angel of Death. As if sensing the creature’s otherworldliness, the drunken hooligans squabbled to escape, dropping the dogtags and Tom's phone on the ground in their haste to leave. When they were out of their sight, the soldier pulled the rifle’s trigger anyway, aimed at the street now laid bare before him. But the cartridge was empty.

It was all for show.

The soldier threw the rifle back into the dark, stormy seas, as if glad to be rid of such an ugly weapon. Machinations of war, reminder of things past. Awkwardly, he bent down and returned Tom's wallet. Offered a hand to get Tom back on his feet, which Tom accepted. Under the lamp post, the soldier's eyes gleamed green. The colour of murky seawaters, the colour of his dungarees. His gaze flickered south, to the dogtags firmly clutched in Tom’s grasp. A flicker of recognition.

_Gibson._

The dogtags had belonged to this man, Tom realized.

And then— as if reminding Tom that he had a voice, ‘Gibson’ uttered a word that would shatter his soul, and his entire world as he had known it.

_"Tommy?"_

 

* * *

 

Gibson continued to stare at him, in wide-eyed wonderment.

“My name is Thomas, yes. But no one calls me Tommy,” Tom explained, inexplicable annoyance began to bubble in his gut.

What Tom later managed to gather from Gibson's garbled mixture of rapid French and broken English, was this:

That Gibson recognized Tom and wanted his dogtags back, but was confused about where he was. Tom asked whether Gibson was an actor or a roleplayer, but he was stunned when Gibson told him that he thought the date was 29 May 1940. Or that Tom looked like the English soldier who had been stranded with him at Dunkirk.

"Tommy," Gibson repeated again, eyes wide with unadulterated hope.

Tom had been known to have a spitting image of his great uncle, who despite having survived Dunkirk, died four years later in Operation Market Garden – a catastrophic failure that Montgomery had famously hailed as a ninety percent success. Tom had wanted to join the army like his uncle, but then he lost his father and a leg, so that dream was over within seconds. 

Despite that he had spent his free time reading his great-uncle Tommy’s diaries and letters of regret – of the fact that he was unable to save a fellow soldier from Dunkirk, a friend who had helped him face the horrors but failed to survive himself. A Frenchman who was accused to be a German spy, because he was dressed in a British uniform.

A man Tommy only had known as Gibson.

Tom remembered everything now, as if he’d read the letters only yesterday. But Gibson was only meant to be a faceless character, alive only on pieces of paper. He wasn’t meant to be alive, wasn’t meant to haunt Tommy’s descendant sixty seven years later.

 _Stop it,_ Tom wanted to say. _I'm not your Tommy._

_This can't be happening._

He thought that he was being pranked, until Gibson showed him a flier dropped by Germans that he’d picked up, drenched from the sea waters. From the pockets of his uniform, he pulled out a Bible, and a diary belonging to the deceased Gibson, lying in a sand dune somewhere in Dunkirk sixty seven years ago.

Between the pages of the Bible, where a bullet hole pierced through from cover to cover, there was a photograph of Gibson. Not the real Gibson, but rather of the man standing in front of him. His cheeks seemed fuller, a genuine happy smile on his face, taken during a time before he became a soldier. He stood proud, a lad not yet twenty, holding an accordion, with his parents and younger sister next to him.

 _“Claudette, ma soeur cadette,”_ Gibson-not-Gibson pointed at the little girl in pigtails. _“Ma mere,”_ he said, pointing at the woman holding a violin in her dainty hands. _“Mon pere,”_ he pointed to the elderly man in the photo, sitting at the piano, fingers flexed as if ready to play. A broad grin on his kind, moustached face. It was dated 1939.

Gibson looked desperate, wanting Tom to understand.

“Your family?” Tom asked, hesitating.

“Family,” Gibson nodded, voice cracking. _“Ma famille._ Tommy?” he asked, eyes twinkling in the half moonlight, as if urging Tom to take him in, like a stray cat.

 “I’m not your Tommy,” Tom said pointedly. “He’s dead. A long time ago,” he explained, thumbnail grazing against the engraved name on the dogtags, before finally giving it the attention it truly deserved. “Gibson,” he read warily, the name heavy against his tongue. A familiar-yet-foreign name. A most-severely English name; a name he had known only from the pages of his great-uncle’s diary, from the letters of regret Private Tommy Blackford had composed while he lay dying in Arnhem.

 _“Oui,_ Tommy,” Gibson nodded emphatically, his eyes wide as saucers, as if willing Tom to transform into his great uncle, the embodiment of a Dunkirk survivor from nearly seventy years ago. But Gibson had the wrong guy.

Tom was not Tommy. Tom was born in the wrong era. Tom barely survived living, let alone surviving a deadly war.

 _"Je m’appelle Tom, pas Tommy,”_ Tom tried again, his hands milling exasperatedly, using up every memory of GCSE French he could muster. Madame Delacroix would be upset that his French had become this rusty. Tom pulled up his driving licence, to prove a point. He continued to fidget, trying to stop himself from punching a wall, or the ground, or Gibson’s perfect teeth. “See? Thomas Blackford, born 1997.” He showed the date on his phone, lighting up as he pressed the home screen. “It’s not 1940 anymore. It’s 2017.”

Gibson watched the LED screen illuminating in stupefaction, initially more fascinated by the device than the date itself, before reality seemed to finally hit him like an avalanche. Suddenly Gibson stumbled backwards and clutched his head, as if in pain. Tom barely managed to catch his phone before it hit the tarmac, as Gibson dropped it from his grip. He couldn’t afford to crack his phone screen again. Meanwhile, Gibson started to mutter something in French, words that Tom couldn’t quite catch.

If this were a dream, it was a strange one. For now, Tom would revel in it. He felt strangely calm, even as the Frenchman dressed as a British soldier panicked and flailed about, began pacing up and down sputtering French words under his breath.

Tom could have left him like that, but he'd felt sorry for the guy. After all, Gibson had had helped him get away from those blokes at the pub, got him back his wallet. Tom was drunk, but he wasn't _that_ drunk. He was as sober as he could be when he'd asked whether Gibson would come with him, and the Frog had looked at him as if Tom was his divine intervention, his soulmate.

Adulation to the point of worship, the Alpha to his Omega.

As if they were bonded for life.

 

* * *

 

Tom returned to the cheap hostel he stayed in, Gibson in tow. No one seemed to care that he was in military gear, even if it made him stand out like a sore thumb. Some slight relief, then. “Are you sure you’re not some stranded refugee, or something?” Tom asked, as soon as they were inside his room.

No response.

“How much English do you know?”

Tom’s words felt like they had hit a brick wall – in the form of a five-foot nine Frenchman, guising as a British soldier. Gibson was still silent, a French deer in headlights.

“No English?” Tom tried again, losing all hope.

Gibson moved his thumb and forefinger together, making an “a little” sign. _“Un peu,”_ he said. “A little,” he repeated, this time in thick accented English. A sheepish smile touched his lips, a tinge of pink colouring his cheeks, as if proud of his little achievement. He scratched the back of his head and looked around at the small hostel room.

“I paid this room to stay with my girlfriend,” Tom explained, when it was clear that Gibson had nil else to say. “She dumped me, so you can have that bed. And you need some clothes,” he added out of nervousness— to fill up the silence, rather than letting Gibson judge him with his silent stares. He had no idea if Gibson understood him, as he moved about the room trying to clear his mess. The food waste spilling out from the trash can, the empty cans of beer, the clothes strewn about the room. Claire’s underwear was still in the loo. Clearly she had left in a huff after their argument. Tom made sure to cover the used condoms in the bin from two days ago, using some rumpled tissue paper. All this while Gibson hadn’t moved a muscle, just watching Tom with a fresh towel in his hands, standing upright.

Waiting for orders, like a good soldier.

Tom handed him a t-shirt and a pair of trousers. “We’re about the same size, so you’ll fit in that. You’ll have to go commando, though. I haven’t got clean undies.”  French wasn’t one of his strongest subjects at school, but at least he had tolerated it better than German. When it was clear that Gibson hadn’t understood a word he said, he resorted to use Google Translate and showed him his iPhone screen. Realization dawned on Gibson’s face, his parched lips parted slightly as he said, “Ah,” in understanding. And then, suddenly made bold by this new way of communicating, Tom typed in, “You stink, you need a shower,” into Google translate and showed Gibson the French translation while making the hand movement for ‘smelly’. Gibson’s wide eyes narrowed slightly, before his lips curved up into another smile and let a low chuckle.

Tom took a sharp breath.  He shouldn’t find the sight endearing, but he did.

Gibson had barely smiled throughout their encounter, and Tom wondered if his great uncle Tommy had the privilege of witnessing the same expression etched on Gibson’s lips.

After a few minutes of showing him how to use the shower, Tom was finally able to let Gibson wash himself in peace. He leafed through the Bible, the diary and the photograph that Gibson had left on the bedside table. The Bible was in English, as was the diary. There was no way that those had really belonged to the Frenchman. The photograph, on the other hand…

Tom flipped the photograph and tried to decipher the words, written in elegant hand, smudged blue ink. He could read the date, some sort of address. 

A name.

_Philippe Hugo Guillet._

The bathroom door clicked open – causing Tom to jerk in shock, dropping the photograph onto the floor. Gibson walked out timidly in a pair of tartan-patterned pyjama trousers and a tattered _Rolling Stones_ t-shirt, clutching the heavy Gibson uniform. His usually dark wild curls were now wet and plastered comically over his forehead. In this light, he looked even paler and malnourished than Tom vaguely remembered from half-an-hour ago, his sharp cheekbones even more prominent. _“Merci,”_ Gibson said.

Tom scrambled for a reply to that. Gibson must have noticed, because he then replied to his own thanks. _“De rien,”_ he shrugged, before dropping the uniform in one corner of the room. He moved closer towards Tom, bending down to pick up the faded photograph at his feet.

“Philippe?” Tom asked.

A pause, then: _“Oui.”_

“Is that your name?”

“Yes,” Philippe replied. In English.

“You have a pretty name. Except that I don’t know how to say your last name.”

Gibson – _no, Philippe_ , he reminded himself – taught Tom how to pronounce his surname – _Guillet. “Gee-yeh,”_ he said, not _Gillette_ like the razor, they laughed and Tom’s breath caught in his throat. He looked up at Philippe – he was exactly the kind of man that Claire would fall for, Tom thought. But she was gone, and Philippe was here in her stead. Green eyes, long lashes, a touch of innocence.

Tom wondered if his great-uncle had ever seen him like this.

Of seeing _Philippe_ , instead of _Gibson._

“We’ve got tonight,” Tom said breathlessly, despite himself. His nervous irritation dissipated, replaced by a certain kind of expectation. Philippe’s weight shifted on the mattress, heavy next to Tom, inches apart. His fingers still tracing the edges of the photograph of a family he once had. _Amiens,_ he said. He was from Amiens, where his family lived before the war. They were gone now. Not the way Claire was gone. Tom’s loss was nothing compared to Philippe’s.

“Tell me about Dunkirk,” Tom said.

So Philippe did.

* * *

Tom woke up to the tune of _Despacito_ , which he had set up as his phone alarm for 7 am. His head hurt. He remembered he had been out drinking his sorrows after Claire had left, then got into a brawl at the pub. He remembered picking up some dogtags somewhere along the pier, and had a weird dream of meeting Gibson, his great-uncle’s object of regret to the point of obsession. Gibson personified was a handsome Frenchman with an even more pretentious French name, and it was strange that Tom could still remember his face, long after the dream was over.

He blinked several times and saw that the TV in the room was switched on. Did he forget to turn it off last night? He lifted his head and saw the back of another man, watching BBC News intently, unruly dark curls going off in all directions. The stranger turned around, and Tom could see that he was wearing his Rolling Stones shirt. _“Tu es réveille,”_ the man said.

_You’re awake._

It wasn’t a dream. Tom immediately sat upright, causing Philippe to raise an eyebrow.

“I’m alright,” Tom said. “Just shocked. You’re fine,” he reassured him. Philippe’s expression softened.

Last night Philippe had attempted to tell Tom about Dunkirk, between the botched up translations of English and French that Google Translate had come up with. Having given up after fifteen minutes, Tom handed Philippe his phone and let him scroll through the French version of Wikipedia. Letting him read about the aftermath of Dunkirk, the D-Day landings, the fall of Hitler, the Holocaust, the fate of Philippe Petain.

The Frenchman had stayed up all night, catching up on world history. The Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall. MTV. Technicolour films. The fall of the Twin Towers. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thatcher. Obama. Charlie Hebdo. Trump. The Paris attacks. Marine Le Pen. Emmanuel Macron. En Marche!

“The world has changed,” Tom had said. “We won. Don’t you see? We won.”

Despite it all, Tom couldn’t say if the world had changed for the better. Once, he probably had wanted to follow his great-uncle’s footsteps and join the army. It seemed like the only plausible option. His grades weren’t great, but at least three family members including his gran had told him how much he reminded them of Tommy, who’d died a hero at Arnhem.

Then that lorry crashed into his father’s old Vauxhall Astra. Tom was lucky to get away with a few broken bones and a BKA. His father had died instantly on the spot. His mom fell deeper and deeper into depression, while his younger brother had to go to a special school due to his autism. Tom was put into a Young Carer’s programme, and he was expected to look after his mom and Harry, now. Except the pressure got too much and he had to run away. If only for a weekend with Claire.

He’d found Philippe, instead.

“What happened to your leg?” Philippe had asked last night with broken English, when Tom took off the prosthetic leg, leaving only a below-knee stump. A gaping hole in his boxers where his left leg should have been.

“Accident,” he’d said.

Tom didn’t know if Philippe’s expression was meant to be pity or sympathy. He didn’t like the look of either.

What he also didn’t know, was how to bring Philippe back to London. What would he explain to his mom and younger brother? He’d managed to spend all his savings to impress a girl who later dumped him, and his mom wasn’t going to be happy. “You don’t have papers, do you? Passport? ID?”

Philippe shook his head.

Tom groaned into his palms, before slapping his cheeks as if to wake himself up from this nightmare, and decided on his next course of action.

The first thing he needed to do once reaching home was to get hold of his uncle’s diary, somewhere in the cramped space of his family’s flat. The second thing he needed to do was to dig up his old French textbooks. The third thing was to get a disposable phone for Philippe, in cases of emergency. The fourth thing was a French-English dictionary. They could teach each other’s languages. Either way, Tom was acutely aware that he was housing an illegal immigrant – who was supposed to be dead sixty seven years ago, no less. It wouldn’t look good if the authorities ended up detaining Philippe and asking him where he came from. He would probably end up detained in a psychiatric hospital, like his mom once was, when she became unwell. The only exception was that Philippe wasn’t unwell. He was just— well, _dead._ Or supposed to be dead.

But before that, there was a more pressing matter.

“We need to get you more clothes. And underwear. Toiletries,” Tom said, as he began shoving his dirty laundry inside his backpack. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Philippe.”

 _“Merci?”_ Philippe asked, shrugging his shoulders.

 _“De rien,”_ Tom replied, proud of himself for being able to remember the correct response.

 _“Je vous en prie,”_ Philippe shot back. “Is more polite,” he shrugged again, before flashing another soft, unsure smile.

 _Fuck’s sake,_ Tom thought. _He’s going to be the death of me._

 

* * *

 

Philippe had stuffed his uniform in a Tesco carrier bag and held on to it awkwardly on the train journey back. As if worried that someone might stumble onto it and discover his big secret, or worried that someone might steal his only connection to the world he came from. After a quick dash to the one pound shop buying cheap undies, clothes and toiletries, they took the Tube back to Tooting. Walking in the acid rain, Philippe was silent throughout their little trek past Streatham Cemetery, to the brown blocks of flat where Tom, his mom and his little brother lived.

“This is my friend,” Tom had said, as they both stood awkwardly at the door. “His name is Philippe. He speaks very little English,” he explained. “So please excuse his French,” he added, a tiny bit proud of the little joke in the end, but no one laughed.

Tom gritted his teeth in response, before his gaze flickered to his little brother. Harry stared up at Philippe for the briefest moment, before running off to watch TV again. As long as Philippe didn’t interfere with his daily routine, Harry would be sorted.

His mom, on the other hand, studied Philippe attentively, from top to bottom. “What’s your name again?”

“Philippe Guillet,” he smiled, and bowed slightly. Had he curtsied, Tom would have had a heart attack.

“ _Madame_ Blackford?” Philippe asked innocently. Tom’s eyes widened further. No one had called his mom _‘_ _Madame_ _’_ , or said his last name with that _obscene_ roll of the tongue. Philippe was dialling up his charm offensive up to eleven, he had to be. Tom’s mom held out her hand, as if transfixed, before Philippe took it gently and placed a soft kiss atop her arthritic knuckles. Tom had to drag him away, while Philippe blinked in confusion.

As soon as they were safe within the confines of Tom’s bedroom, he locked the door and hissed in panic. “What the fuck was that?”

 _“_ _Quoi?_ _”_

“I said act normal, not try to woo her like some sort of Regency romance!”

Philippe merely stared at him like a lost puppy.

Tom tried to push the image of Philippe flirting with his mom deeper into the recesses of his mind, and attempted to press on with the next plan of action. It took him twenty five minutes to search through the organized chaos in his room, before finally hitting the jackpot – the boxes containing Tommy’s diary, photographs and letters. “Gran had wanted to throw everything away, but she said that I looked like him so much even as a kid, that she decided to keep them. And now it’s like a family heirloom, or something,” Tom explained.

In the first few hours, they spent their time studying Tommy’s diary, his descriptions of Gibson, his repeated pleads for forgiveness and mercy for the sins he had committed on Dunkirk beach. Every detail of his escape, from the moment he landed on French soil as part of the BEF, to their retreat from Ardennes to Dunkirk beach. Of being shot down by the Luftwaffe, of meeting Gibson on that sand dune, of carrying a stretcher to the massive Destroyer but failing to stay aboard. Watching the Destroyer sink, meeting Alex – and Philippe winced when the name was mentioned – then the downward spiral of being saved, then sinking again after being torpedoed.

How he and Alex would have died if not for Gibson.

Being towed back to the beach, watching that soldier walk helplessly into the seas, having given up on life altogether. Of finding the trawler, of being made target practice, of drowning in oily seas, of being saved by Mr Dawson of Weymouth.

Of losing Gibson and not realizing it until only afterwards, aboard the Moonstone. The regret hadn’t sunk in, not until later, _years_ later, when his platoon was once again trapped – this time in Arnhem, fighting another lost cause.

A bridge too far.

Tom pointed to a photo of Tommy in PT gear, before his deployment to Dunkirk. “That’s him,” he said. Before all innocence was lost, before plunging into war. 

Philippe held the photo next to Tom’s face, before scrunching his nose and pointed at Tom's left earlobe. Tom understood what Philippe meant. “I know I look like him, except for this,” Tom said, his hand automatically reaching up to his ear, touching the metal there. It was the only major difference between _Tom the loser_ and _Tommy the war hero_ – a gold earring decorating Tom's left earlobe. 

Philippe pursed his lips, considering. “Is pretty,” he said.

Tom wanted to say that it wasn’t the right adjective to describe the earring or him, and failed to suppress the blush that had risen to his cheeks. “It’s just an earring, it’s nothing,” he’d said instead.

Later Tom switched off the lights and went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep. He thought he could hear Philippe next to him grouching, nightmares of war disturbing his rest. Tom wanted to ask what his experience was like, how he became a soldier, what made him want to escape.

But he didn’t. He decided to save it for another day.

It could wait.

 

* * *

 

Over the next few days, Philippe was introduced to pizza, fish and chips, chips and curry. The heavenly taste of Biryani and Chicken Tandoori, of Chinese dumplings and Hainanese chicken rice. The virtues of Pot Noodles and instant ramen. He consumed every meal with delight, as if every bite would be his last, but frowned at the baguettes they sold at Sainsbury’s.

He’d never seen the world beyond Amiens, beyond Paris, beyond the seas further from Dunkirk, and now he had access to everything through the telly screens, the black mirrors of Tom’s ancient Dell laptop and iPhone 6. They continued to communicate using Google Translate, now on the laptop instead of Tom’s phone. He was amazed that Philippe could type relatively quickly, given how he had never used a computer before.

“My father had a typewriter,” Philippe said in French. Tom understood this from the translation given on screen. “I type. A lot.”

“You write?”

“A little,” Philippe replied in English. It was the only word that wasn’t as heavily accented. Probably because he’d said the word too many times, defiantly practiced, copying Tom’s South London accent. 

 _“Un peu,_ ” Tom said, an inside joke between them. Philippe smiled and did the “a little” sign again. _“Un peu,”_ he repeated. 

Tom broke his gaze first, blinking away, scratching the back of his neck that wasn’t even itchy. “What did you write?”

“Short stories, mostly.”

“Like _The Little Prince?”_

Philippe raised his eyebrows. _“Comment?”_

 _“Le Petit Prince?_ You don’t know it?” Tom asked in horror. It was a French staple, surely. As famous as Edith Piaf or the Eiffel Tower, probably. How could Philippe not have known?

He didn’t say a word, but his expression seemed to ask Tom judgingly, “Is that supposed to be something I should know about?”

Tom pulled the laptop closer and started typing _The Little Prince_ in the search box, and groaned when he realized the date of publication. Antoine de Saint-Exupery had published it in 1943. Three years after Dunkirk. Philippe wouldn’t have known it. He closed the tab, and pushed the laptop back half-petulantly.

Philippe watched him like he was amused by Tom’s antics. The dimples on his cheeks, that little smirk. He wished he could scratch it off Philippe’s smug face. Tom clicked his tongue and crossed his arms defensively. “Can I read your stories, then?”

 _“Mais ils ne sont pas la.” But they’re not here,_ Philippe replied, furrowing his brows.  

“But they’re here,” Tom pointed to Philippe’s temple. _“Non?”_

Philippe didn’t reply. Instead, he asked what Tom did for a living.

Tom was embarrassed to tell the truth, but in the end he decided to confess. “I was supposed to be doing an apprenticeship in joinery. Mom used to live on benefits, but now she got a job working as a cleaner at St George’s Hospital, just five minutes from here.  After the stunt I pulled last weekend, I’m not sure if I still have the job, though.” Philippe nodded, pursing his lips in comprehension. “What did you do before the war?” Tom asked when Philippe failed to interject, despite the long pause. 

“I was a student at the University of Paris. I wanted to be like Sartre,” he replied, before pulling his knees up and hugged them. Tom thought he looked like a lost little boy when Philippe did that, huddling against the flaky wallpaper of his bedroom wall. “I looked it up on your Wikipedia. They closed the Sorbonne in 1970,” Philippe explained further.

Tom knew nothing about Sartre or the Sorbonne, except that they both sounded fancy, even if they weren’t in real life. All he knew was that Philippe was more cultured than how his great-uncle Tommy had made him out to be. Far more refined than when Tom had merely known him as a faceless _Gibson,_ a name written on yellowed paper with faded ink, instead of a _Guillet_ in flesh and blood.

 

* * *

 

Tom did lose his apprenticeship, and his mom did berate him for it – but he didn’t feel particularly downtrodden. He hadn’t seen Claire in weeks, hadn’t received any texts, but he didn’t miss her as much as he thought he would.  Philippe stopped him in his tracks while they were walking towards the Tooting Broadway tube station and pointed at a Vacancy poster outside Starbucks. _“Poste vacant. Oui?”_

“No,” Tom shook his head. “I’m not made for customer service.”

“But you drink many coffee,” Philippe persisted, in broken English.

“I’m not— I don’t even know how to make a proper cuppa, let alone some fancy skinny soy latte!”

Philippe scrunched his nose and looked at Tom, as if he was disdainful. Disappointed, perhaps. “Come on, Philippe. Don’t look at me like that,” he tugged on Philippe’s sleeve and pulled him away from the coffee shop window. “If you want coffee, I’ll make one for you at home.”

“What’s a Frappucino?”

Tom groaned. Taking Philippe out was worse than taking Harry – at least Harry wasn’t as inquisitive, he was often busy with his train set or trying to memorize car plates. Philippe was the exact opposite. He questioned everything.

“I’ll buy you one. Just one, alright?”

Philippe nodded, a toothy grin replacing his earlier frown. Tom couldn’t really put him at fault when he did that, damned Frog.

As if possessed by an enthusiastic ghost of a French soldier, Tom submitted his application to Starbucks the next day. Never mind the fact that his CV was empty save for the joinery apprenticeship and a couple of experiences working in charity shops. Frankly, it was a solid embarrassment, but Philippe had urged him on anyway, his faith in Tom unshakeable to the point of worship. Then, like the Miracle of Dunkirk itself, his application was accepted a few days later. Tom was invited to a training day – and just like that, he had a proper job.

“Felicitations!” Philippe had said, beaming from ear to ear when Tom returned from his first day of work. He had waited for Tom outside the door of their flat, playing with Mrs Khan’s cat from next door, fingers stroking the feline’s head and ears, causing her to purr and snuggled comfortably even deeper in Philippe’s arms. Meanwhile, Philippe continued to look at Tom expectantly. He had just showered, Tom realized, his hair damp and smelling of the cheap shampoo Tom had bought for him, his skin smelling of a sweet sickly concoction of soap and Lynx deodorant.

Tom was aware that he reeked, in comparison. Coffee stains on his white shirt, sweat clinging to every pore of his skin, smelling of spilt milk and melted cheese. The summer heat made Tom's temperament worse, made him pick on things that usually wouldn't have bothered him. His reverie was interrupted by Philippe's voice, telling him that there was an Amazon package addressed to him, which Philippe had kindly signed for Tom while he was away that afternoon.

Tom immediately knew what it was.

He went inside and opened found the package on the dinner table. Opening the box felt like unwrapping a Christmas present in June, and he held the small, light item in his hands. Clearing his throat nervously, he called out for the Frenchman. “Philippe?”

 _“Oui?”_ Philippe replied. From where Tom was standing, he could see Philippe’s sharp silhouette contrasting against the narrow doorframe, with the sun filtering through, Mrs Khan’s cat sleeping on his lap. Philippe didn’t move, for the fear of waking her up, but he turned his head to look at Tom, his expression serene.

_Content._

As if there was nowhere else in the world he would rather be. Even if it was a council estate in South East London, with Bollywood music blasting from two floors below.

“I wanted you to have this,” Tom said, trickles of sweat beginning to form on his forehead. He didn’t know why he was feeling nervous – it was just a book. A wee present. For—whatever foolish sentiment he’d had for this Frog. “I—uh, I thought you would like it.”

 _“Le Petit Prince?”_ he said, reaching out for the book and reading the title. “Thank you, Tom,” Philippe uttered – his brows furrowing, as if saying, _‘You shouldn’t have.’_

His eyes, his damned eyes. One second more and Tom would have drowned in them.

He had to pretend to look at the cat, at the book, at the floor – anywhere but those witchy green eyes, the dark circles around them. He knew Philippe had never slept very well, the grouches in his sleep, how jumpy he was with loud noises.

Tom wondered how to explain PTSD to Philippe in French. He’d have to look it up another day.

“It’s a famous book. It’s an oldie – for us, anyway,” Tom said, as Philippe flipped through the coloured pages, tracing the lines of Saint-Exupery’s illustrations with elegant fingers. “But I realized that it was published after Dunkirk, so—I thought you should read it.”

“He reminds me of _Tintin._ ” Philippe had pronounced it as _Taun-taun._ The proper French pronunciation, the fancy bugger. Tom immediately thought about taking Philippe to The Tintin Shop in Covent Garden, if they had free time, one of the days he wasn't working. Somehow he felt obliged to ensure Philippe’s happiness, that he would feel insecure if Philippe’s smile ever faded away, for any reason at all.

This was the burden he had to carry. As if it was some kind of penance.

Retribution.

\--

On weekdays, they would sit down after Tom returned from work and learn each other’s languages, testing each other’s vocabularies and grammar. While Tom might have had a head start due to his lessons from Madame Delacroix, Philippe easily caught up – he would spend hours at the Tooting Library, browsing the Net and reading countless books, while Harry was at school and his mom was at work.

Some days Tom would return from work and find out that Philippe had made dinner, had cleaned the house, had been helping with Harry’s homework, ironed Tom's shirts and Harry's school uniform. Philippe didn’t speak a word of Urdu, but apparently he had been helping out Mrs Khan too, and in return had received a bountiful supply of curry powder, dates, and homemade samosas for supper. His English continued to flourish while Tom laboured behind the Starbucks counter, offering smiles and friendly comments to customers as he took order after order, drawing smileys on their recycled coffee cups with a _Sharpie._ Tom’s French went nowhere, but Philippe didn’t seem to mind.

The disparity between Philippe's English and Tom's French grew wider, and Tom wasn't even surprised one evening to return from work, finding Philippe sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor— his spine curved, hunched over and lost within the broadsheet pages of _The Guardian._ Reading sections on Politics and Economy, about Brexit and the NHS, ISIS and Trump.

“Shouldn’t you be reading news about France?” Tom inquired, curious about this man who had somehow turned into an Anglophile.

“I have,” Philippe replied, and pulled out another folded broadsheet newspaper underneath the Guardian mess, a copy of that day’s _Le Monde,_ before smiling gleefully.

It wasn't the only rift between them. Philippe, to Tom, was a man from a lost era, the Golden Generation, a gentleman in every way. He could have been a dashing French comte dressed in silk and jewels, while Tom would have been some sad orphaned hero out of a Dickens novel, living in squalor. Great-uncle Tommy had it all backwards. Tom felt that he was the only one who had understood Philippe perfectly— his likes and dislikes; his personality. How he preferred his coffee in the morning (strong, with a small dash of milk, no sugar), which side of the bed he sleeps on (the right), how much he hogged the blankets (none – Tom used up all of them, and he would wake up finding Philippe crouched in a fetal position). Philippe was too polite to ask, sometimes. Obscenely polite until Tommy's teeth hurt. It hit him that he hadn't said 'fuck' in a while, as if he would risk destroying Philippe's propriety if he did.

Tom wondered what kind of person Philippe would have been if he was legitimate – if he was allowed to live as a normal person, allowed to work. What kind of writer would he be? A war or political correspondent, perhaps? A theatre critic? A playwright? A novelist? Whatever it was, he would be larger than Tom, better than anything he could ever achieve.

This thought annoyed him for days, because he believed that he would never be good enough for Philippe. He felt ashamed, because this life in a cramped flat in South London was all he could ever provide for a man like Philippe Guillet, when he was clearly meant for so much more.

 

* * *

 

That night Tom opted to show Philippe _Les Miserables_ — the film, not the actual musical, with French subtitles on his laptop– he couldn’t afford to spend his earnings on West End tickets.

“They cut it down significantly. Cosette and Marius weren’t meant to fall in love that quickly,” Philippe complained afterwards. Ever the literary snob. 

“Alright, calm down, Freddo,” Tom retorted. If Philippe understood the intellectual insult, he hadn’t made it evident.

“It’s still good though,” Philippe placated.  “I did shed one tear at the end, when they all started singing, when Fantine showed up with Jean Valjean. Or how Grantaire stuck with Enjolras until the end."

It struck a chord with Tom. He hadn't thought of it before, but was this what their friendship was akin to? Like Grantaire and Enjolras?

For the next few days, Tom thought he caught Philippe humming _Do You Hear the People Sing?_  while helping out with the laundry, but he decided not to say anything – lest Philippe tended to be self-conscious when anyone pointed out anything about him. He did have a nice tone to his voice, though, and Tom wondered if Philippe could actually sing.

That weekend they began to argue about music, when Tom had asked him to listen to Daft Punk— tried to convince Philippe that they were one of the finest artistes France had ever produced. In retaliation, Philippe made him listen to the haunting voice of Edith Piaf, and changed his alarm from _Despacito_ to _The Three Bells_. Tom was horrified that despite proclaiming Edith Piaf to be one of his favourite singers, Philippe had never listened to _La Vie En Rose,_ or _Non je ne Regrette Rien_ , because they were released three, four years after Dunkirk. Madame Delacroix had played them on repeat in French class, made Tom sit through two hours of Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the tragic singer. He forced Philippe to suffer as much as he did, and the Frenchman might have cried harder at the ending of _La Vie En Rose_ than _Les Miserables._

The next few mornings, Tom woke up to Edith’s _Non Je Ne Regrette Rien_ instead of _The Three Bells,_ so he resorted to changing Philippe’s alarm to Daft Punk’s _One More Time._

Two could play at this game.

 

* * *

 

On the afternoon of 19 June 2017, Philippe had planned to make them supper. He had all the ingredients ready to make a flamiche aux poireaux, an Amiens rendition of a puff pastry quiche. The telly was switched on, and then he saw what had happened at Champs-Elysees.

Philippe fell silent.

His comprehension of English may not yet be perfect, but the images on screen described the narrative perfectly. It was another terrorist attack on his homeland. It might not have been Amiens, but it was still France.

Tom’s mom, who was fond of Philippe – who was usually more chipper when he doted on her, probably because she reminded him of Philippe’s own mom, and Harry who reminded him of Claudette – they could feel the tension in the room. Tom had crept behind him slowly, clasped a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Tom whispered.

“It’s okay,” Philippe replied, flour dust staining his pale cheeks, white against the black of his hair. Tom wanted to reach up and wipe them off, but he stopped himself, holding his hands in fists by his sides. Digging painful crescents into the meat of his palm.

"I'm here now. Paris is a place I'll never see again," Philippe said, busying his hands with mixing the dough, although his concentration seemed to be oceans away, across the English Channel, where he was born.

That night they ate supper in relative silence. The quiche was served with bisque and cheap wine. It was good food, good company. But there was no denying that Philippe was more sullen than usual.

Tom helped with cleaning up afterwards, while Tom’s mom helped Harry get ready for bed. “I shouldn’t impose further on your hospitality,” Philippe said, his voice calm against the shrill of the tap water, splashing against the sink. “I can’t stay here forever. I’m taking up space, money, food. Your mom’s probably beginning to think that I’m— a freeloader.”

“My mom likes you around, and my brother likes you. More than he likes me, which is saying something," Tom insisted. "You even helped him with his French homework. You’re more help here than you think," he said, voice low, desperate.

“Like a scullery maid,” Philippe quipped monotonously. His sense of humour was beyond Tom’s comprehension – but still too accurate, almost hurtful. “Just kidding,” he said, holding his hands up in fake surrender, realizing that he might have said something wrong.

“How do you even know what a scullery maid is?” Tom shrieked.

“Obviously, I’ve brushed up on my English while you were working. By that I mean watching your mom’s Downton Abbey DVD boxsets,” Philippe explained excitedly, before turning off the tap and drying his hands on the kitchen towel. “Apparently it’s a big British phenomenon. Also, do you know that the root word of scullery comes from French? _Escuelerie?”_

Tom blinked rapidly, trying to process the image of Philippe watching Downton Abbey and fawning over the fallacy of pre-World War II British aristocracy. “Now you’re showing off.”

“Sorry,” Philippe said, but the joy in his eyes had faded. Humour was one of his many defence mechanisms, and it only worked up to a certain point. Tom grasped his wrists gently, trying to read the lines on his face, the words Philippe wasn’t saying. “Are you homesick?”

“I don’t think I could go back. You said it yourself, I’m an alien. I don’t have a passport.”

“I’m sorry, Philippe.”

“Nothing we could do. It’s not my home anymore,” Philippe retorted, a tinge of melancholy in his voice. “It’s France, but it’s not _my_ France. Not the France that I remembered,” he said. “Have you been to France?”

“No,” Tom snorted cynically. “We can’t afford to go on holiday.”

As abrupt as Philippe’s original question had been, he suddenly told Tom, “I’ll take you there.” Like it was some kind of a forlorn promise. “Someday,” Philippe continued, his gaze burning Tom's skin. Tom’s neck snapped up in attention. In this light, Tom couldn't tell what the colour of his eyes was – it could have been mossy green, coral blue, the murky Seine River, the great Alpine lakes. Tom wouldn’t have been able to pick the right vocabulary anyway, as he’d thought of himself an uncultured swine. Either way, Tom was drowning in them, he could hardly breathe.

“How are you going to take me there?” Tom asked, more abrupt than intended. “You said it yourself, you don’t even have a passport?”

Philippe merely shrugged and pulled his wrists from Tom’s gentle grip, rubbing at his skin where Tom’s touch had been. Hurt flickered in his eyes, despite his attempts to hide it from Tom.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said in a half-whisper, as if a thousand apologies would make it any better. “I’m sorry for everything that you’ve been through—," and then, "I’m sorry for what happened to you in that trawler,” he added. He had read what had happened between Philippe, Alex and Tommy. The baseless accusations. The delineation between being English and non-English. “You don’t deserve it.”

“Nothing really changed,” Philippe lifted his downcast gaze, meeting Tom’s eyes half-heartedly, as if scared of what he would find there. “When you’re alone, you want a companion. You want to belong, you want to be part of a bigger thing. A sense of unity.” Tom nodded in understanding. “But soon there’ll be a _them_ and an _us_. It’s always been like that, the entire way across history. Nothing ever changes. The Allied and the Axis powers. French and the English. Left and right wing. Liberals and conservatives. Always an _us,_ always a _them._ Nothing ever changes, even as time moves forward.”

Tom didn’t think he could ever top that speech, as affecting as it was. An inexplicable emotion surged within him, so he surprised himself by asking the next question without faltering. “Why did you run, Philippe?” It wasn't his prerogative to pass judgment. He only wanted to satisfy his curiosity.

“Because I wanted to live," Philippe replied. As simple as that, and yet it was a fair answer. "Sitting ducks like that for days, on that beach – that wasn’t a battle. That was resigning yourself to fate, waiting to die,” he said. “You can’t win a war like that.”

“If you had survived back then, if you’d come to Britain with Tommy, not knowing what the future would hold – would you have gone back to France?" Tom asked. A useless, hypothetical question, but he had to know. He needed to know what Philippe would have done, had he been given the chance to live. "Would you fight?”

“I probably would,” Philippe replied swiftly, his voice cracking. “And I would probably die. Again—”

 _‘—like Tommy,’_ were the words he didn’t say, but Tom heard them anyway.

“Or I would probably _actually_ become a spy,” Philippe added drily, a wry smile touching his lips. It was meant to be humorous, and Philippe _did_ laugh, but it came out all bitter. As bitter as Alex’s accusation in the Dutch trawler. “And I would probably die,” Philippe's smile faltered. _“_ _Again._ _”_

“Don’t say that,” Tom clutched Philippe’s hands, cold from the water. His palms calloused from working with rifles and doing house chores. “You’re alive now.”

“But why am I here?”

Philippe's question was like a warning bell, tolling ceaselessly in Tom's mind. While he had no definitive answer, he was still proud with his reply. “It’s a time warp. When you drowned, you fell through a time warp, and you swam your way to me. To Dover, I mean,” Tom said, “And you found me.”

He had replied in one breath, without a pause or stutter. As if he had practiced them for years, bubbling under the surface, threatening to spill at any given chance.

The clock ticked.

A beat passed, then another.

Philippe blinked once, twice. Then he took a deep breath. Opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, as if he was changing his mind. Tom thought he could hear the gears whirring in Philippe’s brain as he struggled to rack up a reply.

 _“Distorsion temporelle,”_ Philippe finally said, causing Tom to raise an eyebrow. “Time warp—,” Philippe said again, _“—en français,”_ explaining as if Tom was back in Madame Delacroix’s class again. “I’ve been reading too. Quantum physics, time-space continuum. It was fascinating.”

“You only said time-warp in French to make it sound cooler.”

 _“Coo-_ ler,” Philippe repeated with a frown, his French accent thick as he measured the word on his tongue. _“Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?”_

“What does that mean?” Tom asked, to confirm his understanding of Philippe’s question. The Frenchman nodded. “It means that it’s cool.”

“Cold?” Philippe asked, before imitating a shivering noise, pretending to warm himself up. “No, no,” Tom protested, realizing that Philippe had misunderstood his meaning. “Cool, as in—,” he gritted his teeth, wracking his brains for a French equivalent, _“—en vogue?_ Trendy?”

 _“Tu es étrange,”_ Philippe quipped, a glint of mischief in his eyes.

That, Tom could understand.

As brief as it had appeared, that glint of mischief was gone only moments after, replaced by an unfathomable depth of sorrow.

 

* * *

 

Weeks passed. As any rolling news, the Champs-Elysees attack was soon forgotten, and Londoners resumed their lives as before. During that time, Tom and Philippe had increased their efforts in understanding how Philippe ended up getting stranded at Dover, or why. Each day led to little fruition.

Tom wondered if they had to go back to Dunkirk, to the exact spot where Philippe had drowned, to gain an answer. "How are we going to do that? By smuggling me through immigration in some boat?" Philippe asked.

"Fake passport, fake ID. I could probably get one for you."

"I don't want you to get into trouble on my behalf. It's not worth it, Tom."

Tom genuinely could have obtained them for Philippe, if he'd really tried. But it was apparent that Philippe had given up hope on ever returning to France, and perhaps Tom subconsciously didn't want risk losing Philippe, one way or another. Any talk of returning to Dunkirk was abandoned, and each day Philippe grew more attached to Tom – probably to the detriment of his other friendships.

Determined to quieten the rumours, Tom decided to bring Philippe to one of his friend's birthday gigs, at a pub in central London.

 _The Jingling Geordie_ was situated near Soho, its patrons a mixture of middle and working class Londoners. Tom would have frequented it more regularly if not for the distance he had to travel, even if Barry promised that he would get a pint for free. Barry was a friend of his dad's and had been the one who got him the joinery apprenticeship in the first place. He hadn't seen Barry since coming back from Dover, and clearly he had received word about Tom's mishap.

There were many reasons why he could have declined the invitation. First, to save face after losing his job. Second, he wasn't sure if Philippe would be comfortable, even if his English had improved so much. Third, it was where he'd met Claire— she worked there as a singer. As Tom explained to Philippe, "She auditioned for The X-Factor. She got to the second round, but was booted out afterwards.”

Philippe scrunched his nose. “X-Factor?”

“It’s a singing contest.”

“Wait," Philippe stopped in his tracks. "Isn’t Claire the same girl who left you in Dover? Is it alright for you to go if she’s there?”

“It’s Barry’s birthday," Tom explained. "He’s my mate, and he owns the place. I can cope. I don’t have to speak to her if I don’t need to," he reassured Philippe, whose quizzical brow never ceased to amuse Tom.

The place was heaving when they arrived. There was beer and ale and every alcoholic beverage that Philippe could think of. Brief introductions, Barry hugged Tom and clapped his back, roaring gregariously as patrons wished him Happy Birthday. A firm handshake between Barry and Philippe, and every time Tom explained to people that Philippe was French, one of three topics would come up:

  1. _How do you think Brexit will affect relations between France and the UK?_
  2. _Who do you think will win the presidential election, Le Pen or Macron?_
  3. _Can you recommend me a nice place to travel in France next summer?_



Being a genteel, charming man that Philippe was, he happily chatted to anyone who would listen, reverting to rapid French when he became excited, cheeks flushed from the heat and the alcohol. Tonight, he didn't seem like a fish out of water – he looked like he belonged.

And Tom was strangely proud of that.

Yet a pang of jealously suddenly struck him – not because no one was paying him any attention, but because he realized that Philippe was no longer his little secret. As if Philippe was his and his alone, not to be shared with the entire world.

He shrugged off the notion as soon as it came to his mind – another foolish sentiment. Philippe was never his to begin with. Philippe was his own man, and he deserved to broaden his horizons beyond the narrow doorframe of Tom's flat.

Philippe kicked Tom's Chuck Taylor-imitations under the stool when Claire went on stage – a small, makeshift platform at one corner of the pub, musical instruments laid out for use. Clutching her guitar, Claire was as beautiful as ever, but tonight she wasn't the apple of Tom's eye. The crowd hushed when she started singing about sad loves and longing, but soon the conversations ramped up again, the song forgotten – she was no longer singing for her audience, but herself. Her voice was pretty, husky – with an indie singer-songwriter quality to it. Evidently it wasn’t unique enough to launch her career as a pop star, or to earn a place in the next round of The X-Factor. Before, Tom had thought that it was a travesty. Now, her voice was only one of many, dispersed amongst the maddening crowds.

“She has a lovely voice," Philippe leaned to whisper into Tom's ear, sending shivers down Tom's spine.

“You’re just being kind," Tom replied into his drink, unwilling to meet Philippe's eyes.

The next song was an acoustic, indie-fied version of Fatboy Slim’s _Praise You,_ which used to be an iconic dance anthem on its own. The chorus was still as catchy, acoustic or not, and Tom realized that Philippe was tapping his foot along to the beat. Soon enough, Philippe started to hum along. It wasn’t off-key, but it wasn’t the melody, either. Tom realized that Philippe was humming the harmonization of the tune.

He blamed the alcohol for what he was about to ask, as he placed a hand on Philippe’s shoulder, to steady himself. “You _really_ can sing, can’t you?”

Philippe jerked, sitting upright, caught red-handed. “Uh,” he began sheepishly and held up the finger sign Tom had known so well by now. “A little?”

“Somehow I think you’re lying, mate.”

“My father was a travelling musician,” Philippe clicked his tongue, aiming for casual, but Tom knew better – it all came out strained, of memories from a lost life.  Of course Philippe came from a family of musicians – his father was photographed next to a piano, his mother was holding a violin – Philippe himself was holding an accordion. And Tom had thought nothing further of it, thinking that it was all for show, the way people back then used to pose for awkward family photos.

“Can you play the piano too?” Tom asked again. “And if you say _un peu_ again, I’m going to put a dent in your perfect cheekbones.”

A booming voice interrupted their conversation. “What’s this? Your friend can sing? And play the piano too?” Tom turned his head and saw Barry’s towering frame, dressed in Chelsea blue, standing right behind them. He had been eavesdropping on their conversation.

Suddenly, the crowds fell silent – because the song was over or Barry's voice, Tom wasn't sure. All attention was placed upon Philippe, now. “I’m rusty. I’ve not sang or played – in ages,” he stuttered.

 _Since the war,_ Tom realized. But he wasn’t about to admit that out loud.

“Come on, lad. Show us what you’ve got.”

Philippe widened his eyes, as if asking Tom for help. “Leave him be, Barry. He’s a bit shy,” Tom said, in a half-arsed attempt to prevent the upcoming massacre. But the crowds were already pushing Philippe towards the stage, where Claire looked on with her friends curiously. Eventually Philippe sat down at the piano, the wood creaking as he shifted his weight on the stool. He pressed the middle C key tentatively, as if one wrong push would blow up the whole joint.

 _“_ _Bonjour,_ _”_ he said into the microphone, voice quivering. A quiet applause followed, before a loud whoop came from beside the stage. It was Kate, one of Claire’s friends. Claire slapped her arm to shut her up. Philippe paid no attention to this, as he furrowed his brows, scanning the crowd until he found who he was looking for – Tom.

 _“Je m’appelle Philippe,”_ he began, “—and I’m here tonight with my friend Tom,” he pointed over at where Tom was seated, sinking lower and lower to avoid being recognized. He shook his head, feeling more surreal with every passing moment. Philippe was a nervous wreck on stage, his voice trembling more than anything that Tom had ever heard.

“Tom told me that it was Barry’s birthday today,” Philippe continued, his English crisp and clear. French accent still there – but light on his tongue. It would have been a thousand times better than Tom’s atrocious French. “So Happy Birthday, Barry,” he added with a roguish smile.

“Are you going to sing Happy Birthday in French?” a voice shouted from behind the bar. It was Clarice, the bartender, also a close friend of Barry’s. _“_ _Non,_ _”_ Philippe replied with a chuckle, a blush on his cheeks. The booze had got to him, Tom realized. This was a display of Dutch courage, if nothing else. “But I’m going to sing a French song anyway,” Philippe cracked a boyish grin.

Another loud whoop.

 _“_ _Oui,_ _”_ Philippe quipped, earning laughter from the crowd. In another life, he could have been a performer, Tom thought. But the crowd hushed when Philippe began to press the ivory and ebony keys together, the sound tinkling gracefully, floating through the atmosphere.

The melody was a light jangle on Philippe’s fingertips, but Tom didn’t know where it was going – until Philippe started to sing. So Philippe probably messed up the chords on the first and second verses, but he sang the chorus perfectly, as he gained more confidence. Tom didn’t realize until the chorus that Philippe was singing an Edith Piaf song that had been downloaded on his iTunes playlist.

_L’accordeoniste._

The accordionist.

_Bien sur._

There was no doubt that Philippe had a beautiful singing voice – he knew when to croon, when to make himself sound raspier, for the emotional impact. Tom felt blessed to have been able to hear this, to witness this. He doubted Uncle Tommy would have seen Philippe on a piano stool, singing carelessly in French.

Not in Dunkirk.

A loud applause filled the air when the song ended, although no one else in the pub understood a word Philippe had sung, save for Philippe himself. “Encore!” someone shouted. “Sing a song in English!”

“Uh,” Philippe said into the microphone again, the echo resonating through the pub. He jerked his head back, surprised by the loud sound. “There is an English song I’ve learnt just recently, after I came to England. It came out in winter 1940, so by today’s standards, it’s old,” he said, directing the statement to Tom— as if trying to let him know that the song was released after the Dunkirk evacuations. “But I found out that this song is very famous, and I like it a lot too, so…” he drifted off, before pressing another key.

And another, and another, before forming another chord.

Tom knew the opening few notes even before Philippe had started singing. It was one of his mom’s favourite old tunes.

_Bewitched, bothered and bewildered._

It was as if Philippe could see right through him and knew what Tom was thinking, how he was feeling.

_You fucking witch._

Philippe hadn’t even bothered to change the gender prepositions, the lyrics from ‘he’ to ‘she’. People would have pardoned him anyway, thinking that he was French and maybe prepositions were never his strong suit. Nevertheless, their gazes found each other more than once throughout the song, as if Philippe was purposefully searching for Tom in the middle of the crowd.

Tom had to look away, had to pretend that the wine bottles behind the bar were far more interesting than what was happening a few metres away. He absorbed himself in another drink while women (and some men) in the pub marvelled at Philippe, the charming French snake that he was.

 _I’ll sing to him, each spring to him_  
_I’ll worship the trousers that cling to him_  
_Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I…_

The pub was silent after the last note floated in the air, sustained for several heavy seconds, before vanishing into thin air. Someone stood up from his chair, the ugly sound of wood against cement, before he started to clap. The sound was echoed by another, then another – before everyone erupted into cheers. A standing ovation. Barry, the big, tattooed, bald man furtively wiped tears from his eyes. By the time Philippe returned to his stool next to Tom’s at the bar, everyone in his path was patting him in the back, telling him that he deserved to be as famous as Adele, or Sam Smith, or Harry Styles.

“I don’t know who that is,” Philippe replied with naked honesty.

“I’ll forgive you,” one of the girls said. “Because you’re French," she winked.

Another girl pushed her way through the dispersing crowd, approaching the bar. She ignored Tom altogether and clearly only had eyes for Philippe. “Hi,” the girl began coquettishly.

“Hello,” Philippe replied. For this momentous occasion, he was wearing an eternally calm, bemused expression that never failed to make Tom’s stomach flip.

“For the record, I think you’re hotter than Harry Styles,” she said. “And I’m saying this as a fan of Harry Styles.”

Tom didn’t think he could stand to watch this any longer than five minutes, though. Another eye-rolling preamble, Philippe being as gentlemanly as ever, before the girl—Kirsten – eventually cut to the chase and asked Philippe if he would like to walk her home. Tom hadn’t really been in a situation like this – he hadn’t hoped for any kind of ideal reply from Philippe, he was only hoping that this encounter would end as soon as possible.

“I’m sorry,” Philippe shook his head apologetically. “I’m already with someone.”

Tom looked up from his drink, stunned shitless. He thought he'd heard wrong, but he found Philippe shooting a glance at him, not Kirsten. Another furtive nod, before Philippe finally diverted his gaze towards her. The girl looked at Philippe, then at Tom, then – as if grasping a situation that wasn’t even happening, she said, “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize you two…” and shook her head, chuckling wryly. The tips of her ears were beet-red, and Tom’s deadly stare probably wasn’t going to help the situation.

“Your voice is very lovely, though,” she said, completely oblivious to Tom and Philippe’s effective communication through silent glances at each other. “I hope you enjoy England. Sorry about Brexit!” she shook Philippe’s hand hastily and galloped away, leaving a trail of perfume in her wake.

“She smells nice,” was Philippe’s only comment afterwards. Tom, however, was still reeling from Philippe’s poor excuse for turning her down.

“You’re already with someone?” he shrieked, repeating Philippe's words. At first, Tom thought it was just a bad English translation of whatever French phrase Philippe had in mind. But Philippe merely shrugged, before pursing his lips thoughtfully.

 _“Oui._ I’m with you,” Philippe frowned. _“Non?”_

 _Don't say things that you don't mean,_ Tom wanted to say. But he didn't. "You're with me, but you're not _with_ me," Tom said, instead. “Do you understand?” Tom asked.

Philippe tilted his head, eyes sharp like a hawk’s, considering. He held Tom's gaze for a second too long, before nodding gently.

Yet as the night progressed, Tom couldn’t help but feel like he was the one who had wrongly understood.

\--

tbc


	2. the end

 

 

 

 

 

> _“I am looking for friends. What does that mean – tame?"_  
>    
>  _"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."_  
>    
>  _"To establish ties?"_  
>    
>  _"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”_
> 
> ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

 

 

Saturday night on the southbound Tube from Tottenham Court Road, on the Northern Line, was a riot.

Two men were openly kissing two feet away from Tom, and he paid them no mind. In the corner of his eyes, he saw Philippe chancing a glance at them, before looking down at the tips of his shoes. More people were rushing into the cars at Leicester Square, causing Philippe to shift closer to Tom. Women in high heels and short dresses, jolly after a night out.

There was no doubt that they were attractive. One of them caught Tom’s gaze, before looking away, smiling shiftily as if she knew something that Tom didn’t. The train rocked forward, causing Tom to stumble against Philippe – hand grasping at the sleeve of his shirt. They were facing standing each other, in the corner of the car, as the train came to another halt.

Waterloo.

Passengers leaving, yet even more passengers embarking. They were pushed even further into the tight corner. Tom’s gaze flitted over to the gay couple from earlier. They had left the train, now walking hand-in-hand towards the tube station’s exit. Proud of their love.

Tom’s mind drifted briefly to his last conversation with Barry before they left the pub, telling him that he seemed happier, chattier; blissful. That Barry had noticed how Tom had hummed under his breath because Philippe did; how he had even started to whistle. How Tom had started using French terms of endearments as much as Philippe picked up Tom’s casual ‘bollocks’ and ‘mate’ in his conversations.

 _Fuck,_ Tom had thought. Philippe was rubbing off on him, crawling under his skin.

The train started moving again. Tom could feel Philippe’s warm breath on his skin, his jeans-clad thigh pressing against Tom’s. The heat was unbearable. He hadn’t realized that he was still holding onto Philippe’s shirt sleeve. It was fascinating to watch Philippe when he thought no one was looking. All his life he has been the outsider looking in – a watcher on the walls, silent, calculating.

Now, though.

Philippe always seemed wary—as if something was going to go wrong. Looking for a way out.

“You okay?” Philippe asked, his voice a low rumble against the screech of the Tube.

“Yeah,” Tom whispered. As if emboldened by this statement, Philippe edged closer, shifting his weight from one foot to another, before reaching behind Tom to hold onto the railing. The movement was purely to steady his stance, but it also meant that Tom was half-ensconced in Philippe’s arm. An innocent gesture and yet so intimate.

Tom lolled his head back against Philippe’s arm, pretending to strain his neck and closed his eyes. Their thighs brushed against each other’s. If Tom had raised his hips, Philippe would know the effect he was having on Tom. Another jerk or the car, another screech to a halt.

Kennington.

More people coming in, although it wasn’t peak hours on a Monday morning. Philippe grabbed onto Tom’s shoulder, before turning away when the space behind him opened up. Tom let out a heavy sigh – of relief, of regret, he couldn’t quite tell. Philippe’s gaze shifted lower to Tom’s crotch. If he’d noticed, he hadn’t said a word.

The car cleared up the further south they go, until eventually they found seats at Clapham Common. Three more stops until they disembarked, left the tube station and were greeted by the chilly midnight air.

“There sure were a lot of people,” Philippe said, breaking the icy silence as they walked home.

“That’s Saturday night in London for you,” Tom replied, as he kept marching forward. Philippe lagged behind him, which was unusual. “Philippe?” Tom paused, letting the Frenchman catch up with his stride – he looked deep in thought. “You okay?”

Philippe gritted his teeth. “I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d known each other outside of this. In real life,” he pondered.  

“We did meet in real life,” Tom replied pointedly. He didn’t like where he thought this conversation was going.

“No, if we’d met— if I was born in your era,” Philippe clarified. “Would we have become friends? If I’d known you first instead of your Uncle Tommy—,” he began, but Tom cut him off.

“You wouldn’t be friends with me,” Tom said self-effacingly. “You wouldn’t even want to talk to me. And that’s an understatement.”

“You don’t know that,” Philippe retorted sharply.

“Ha, bloody ha-ha- _ha_ ,” Tom laughed sardonically, before narrowing his eyes and frowned. “Funny, Philippe,” he huffed.

“Doesn’t matter,” Philippe said with an exaggerated shrug. “You’re my friend now, so who gives a _fuck_ about the past, right?”

Tom’s eyes widened. “Did you just swear?”

“Excuse my French,” Philippe joked, before grinning like a madman. Tom stared at him in disbelief, before breaking into a hearty laughter. Just like that, the tension was broken, until Tom paused again, evaluating the weight of Philippe’s confession. “Did you mean it?” he asked, lifting his head up suddenly— the sharp movement causing Philippe to jolt.

“About what?” Philippe asked.

“That I’m your friend?”

Philippe snickered softly, before kicking a pebble away. “Yes, Tom. You’re my friend.”

“Was that hard to say?”

“Not at all, Tom.”

“Then you’re my friend too,” Tom said, beaming proudly from ear to ear.

 

* * *

 

It was half-past midnight when they reached home. The streets winding down to their flat blocks were deserted, but in the distance Tom could hear a few flats away having probably a sleepover party, singing old Britney Spears and Spice Girls songs. “Shh,” he said as he turned the key to the flat. “Mom and Harry’s asleep. We gotta be quiet.”

“Okay,” Philippe whispered, before breaking into a mischievous snicker when he accidentally bumped into Tom in the dark. Tom ended up giggling too, before putting a finger on his lips and pulled Philippe safely into his room. The door closed with a soft click.  

“That was fun,” Tom said, cheeks flushed, before sprawling like a starfish on his bed. Philippe stood silently against the door, hands clasped behind his back. “It was,” he murmured, before taking one swift stride towards Tom, sitting cross-legged on the floor, by Tom’s bed. Tom pushed himself on his elbows to look at Philippe.

“Hello, Philippe,” Tom said, unaware of the idyllic smile he wore on his own face.

“Hello, Tom.”

Tom sat up, hanging his legs by the edge of the bed. Philippe peered up at him from where he was sitting, as if Tom was about to bestow him with a gift. His soft expression changed when Tom spoke. “You could have walked her home, you know. I won’t mind.”  

“I don’t want to walk her home,” Philippe replied sharply, as though insulted by Tom’s words. “I want to walk _you_ home.”

Tom held his breath. “Philippe,” he said, exhaling the name. A warning.  

“Tom,” Philippe whispered back.

Between the silence between them, Tom thought he could hear his own heart pounding in his ears.

“You’re drunk,” Tom reasoned, when Philippe refused to budge. “Do you even know what you’re saying?”

“I’m sober,” Philippe retorted, but he didn’t seem angry. “I wanted to come home with you. So I did.”

Tom clutched at his bedspread, shaking his head slightly. “Philippe,” he uttered again. He’d run out of rebuttal for this argument.

“Tom,” Philippe said, as if acknowledging the defeat.  

“Fuck.”

 _“_ _Merde,_ _”_ Philippe nodded sagely.  

“I’ve only known you for – three months. It felt like I’ve known you longer than that. Like I’ve known you all my life. Through _him,_ ” Tom rubbed his eyes tiredly, as if that would stop the tears that were threatening to well up. “I don’t think I’m the one you really want to come home to, Philippe. I’m just a second-rate carbon copy of him. All my life, I’ve always been compared to him. And I would never be good enough,” he gesticulated wildly. “Look at this stupid thing,” he reached down to pull up his left trouser-sleeve, revealing the prosthetic leg.

Philippe held his hands, stopping him in his tracks. “Tom,” he pleaded. “You’re two different people. I don’t want him. He’s gone. I barely knew him,” he said. “But I know _you._ And you’re here.”

“I’m _supposed_ to be here,” Tom replied stubbornly. “But why are _you_ here? You’re supposed to be dead, lying in the bottom of the sea somewhere, like fish fodder.”

A flicker of hurt flashed in Philippe’s eyes. He pulled his hands away. “It’s a question I ask myself every day.”

“Why me?” Tom pressed on. “Why do you have to come and find me?”

“Also a question I ask myself every day,” Philippe replied, shoulder slumped as he looked down at his hands, the lines on his palms, as if he was trying to read his future.  

“What do you want from me?” Tom asked, his voice cracking. Philippe’s head snapped up to attention, but he struggled to find the appropriate answer. As if there were a million things he wanted to say but couldn’t. Philippe took a deep breath and closed his eyes, before he risked a glance up at Tom again.

“Nothing,” Philippe finally said. “I just want you to be you. And no one else. Not even your great-uncle Tommy. I just want you to be Tom Blackford from Tooting, who listens to Daft Punk and works as a barista at Starbucks.”

Tom was stunned.

All his life, he had always been insecure. A broken toy soldier, playing make-believe. Until Philippe—who had risen from the deepest caverns, from deep beneath the oceans, and single-handedly put Tom back together again. Even if they knew little about each other, or the purpose they had in life. Why Philippe was washed ashore in Dover sixty seven years after Dunkirk to meet him—when it could have been anyone else, any time else, anywhere else in the world.

Philippe knelt on the floor, looking up at Tom from underneath his eyelashes. Quiet, undemanding. He reached up to hold Tom’s hands again, pressed them to his lips and kissed his knuckles. Whispered prayers into his skin. Tom wasn’t religious, but if God was watching – if God was listening to his pounding heartbeat right now, He would know that it was all because of Philippe.

The Frenchman rested his forehead on Tom’s knees, hands still clutched, fingers clasped—and for a moment, Tom thought Philippe had fallen asleep. “Philippe?”

“Yes?”

Tom ran his hands in Philippe’s hair, tangling his fingers in those untamed curls, which had grown past military regulation. He traced the shell of Philippe’s ears, the sharpness of his cheekbones, his jaw. Philippe closed his eyes, sinking deeper into Tom’s touch, like the cat purring in his lap a few weeks before.

In a bold, swift movement, he thumbed Philippe’s lower lip, and the Frenchman caught it between his lips, nipping gently between his teeth.

Tom inhaled sharply.

This was dangerous territory.

Philippe opened his eyes, lifting his hand to grasp at Tom’s wrist tenderly. He opened his mouth wider, closed it around Tom’s thumb, sucking at the flesh. It was a double entendre for something else entirely – Philippe’s intent was unmistakable, but he was too cowardly to ask, to act – so he had to make do with this, instead. Tom could feel himself getting harder with every lick, like a kitten’s tongue against his skin.

“Philippe,” Tom warned, before pulling his hand away. If Philippe was disappointed, he didn’t show it. Instead, he held his body upright, while still kneeling on the floor, at Tom’s feet— as if he was worshipping him, offering libations at the altar of his God. He kept his head down, and pressed kisses at the top of Tom’s clothed knees. Tom couldn’t see his eyes, but soon he knew why.

Philippe was crying.

“Don’t,” Tom lifted him up, supporting him with his arms, pulling Philippe closer to him. “Don’t cry.”

When he placed his lips upon Philippe's cheeks, he tasted salt. If Tom could kiss his tears away, he would. They rested their foreheads against one another, noses bumping as Philippe began muttering more French litanies under his breath, warm against Tom's skin. His long, bony fingers reached up to cup Tom's face, thumb tracing the cool metal on his earlobe.

And then, Philippe's lips finally caught his— after what felt like eternity, chasing each other across continents, between oceans and time and the universe.

 _Finally,_ he thought, and _why did I ever hold out for so long?_ It felt like a lease of new life had been breathed into him. The kiss was soft at first— as if Philippe was scared that if he deepened it, Tom would break. It wasn't until Tom pulled away that he realized how his face was wet too, from his own tears. Philippe nipped at his jaw, his neck, his collarbone. Tom wanted more. He _needed_ more, as he held onto Philippe like a lifeline, fingers tracing the metal chains on Philippe's neck, tugging at his dogtags of someone else's name.

He let Philippe undress him, and felt self-conscious when he took his trousers off. He had never let anyone see him naked – not like this, not even with Claire. Philippe was biding his time, as if he had all the hours in the world. He had waited sixty-seven years, what was a few moments more?

Philippe had seen him take off his prosthetic leg and putting it on too many times, so it wasn't surprising that he knew how to do it for Tom. He had never let anyone see his stump up close, let alone touch it – he had been ashamed of his disability, a marker of his failure, the reason why he would never be as great as Uncle Tommy – but tonight that didn't matter anymore.

Tom hissed when Philippe kissed the top of his knees, a sign of reverence, kissed the end of his stump and telling him that it would be alright. "I've never done this before," Tom confessed. "Not like this." Not just with a man. He had never been with anyone who saw him not just as a mutual pleasure-chaser, but a man worth to be cherished.

_Loved._

Philippe laid him out on the bed, almost naked save for the cotton underwear he was still wearing. It was unfair how Philippe was still fully dressed, his dogtags hanging from his neck as he bent down and kissed Tom again, and groaned when Tom had to gasp for air. Tom was straining in his underwear, but Philippe purposely ignored him, touching him everywhere but _there,_ dropping butterfly kisses all over his body but where Tom needed him the most.

"Philippe, _please,_ " Tom begged, toes curling as Philippe worked his way down, before finally mouthing at his clothed erection. Tom's instantaneous reaction was to grasp helplessly at Philippe's head, pulling his hair as he pulled Tom's underwear down, discarding it amongst the heap of forgotten clothes on the floor.

Tom had never felt like this – he had never been given this much attention and still yearned for more. He was already sensitive from where Philippe had touched him, and let out a dissatisfied groan when Philippe peeled off, leaving him cold against the chilly air. He was gone for several seconds to undress before joining Tom on the bed, leaving Tom to marvel at Philippe's compact, lithe body.

"I want you in me," Tom said.

"Are you sure?"

"I've never been surer in my life," Tom said, and it was the truth.

"If you've never done this, it will hurt."

"I'd rather get hurt now than live with the pain of not knowing."

Philippe checked with him several times, to make sure that he really understood how much Tom wanted this. How much he desperately needed this. "If it hurts, if you want to stop, tell me."

 _"Arretez,"_ Tom said, smiling into the crook of Philippe's neck, as his fingers ventured between Tom's thighs. Philippe paused, concerned.

"That's French for stop, isn't it?"

"You're doing French lessons now?" Philippe reprimanded, but only light heartedly, before resuming his task. He paused several times, making sure there was enough lube, that there were condoms. When the first finger breached him, Tom hissed, but the pain wasn't as bad as he had expected. Philippe added another finger only after Tom was used to the first one, and then another, before he really started to fingerfuck Tom in earnest. He switched his movements and shifted slightly to the left, before he hit the spot that made Tom see stars.

"Fuck, do that again—," Tom said, his breath hitching, keening into Philippe's touch until he couldn't bear it anymore. "Philippe, I need you now. _Please."_

Philippe rearranged the hair strands that had fallen over Tom's sweaty forehead, and hushed his cries with more deep kisses. He tasted like lime and salt. Tom was no longer embarrassed about making desperate moans into them, to show Philippe how much he needed this. He saw how Philippe's fingers trembled as he was putting on the rubber, and he did wonder how Philippe was going to fit. He bent down to kiss Tom again, before finally pushing in. Slowly, but surely.

Tom reached up for Philippe's hand, clasping their fingers together as Philippe pushed deeper, and deeper, filling him in until their bodies were flush together, skin to skin. Philippe kissed his brows, his eyelids, but he didn't move. Making sure that Tom was okay.

"Hello, Tom," he smiled, once he was fully seated inside Tom. His voice hoarse, needy with desire.

"Hello, Philippe," Tom whispered back. "You could move now, you know. I'll be fine."

That was the only encouragement Philippe needed. He began to pull out, inch by inch, making sure Tom would feel the friction, feeling the loss, the emptiness – before driving back in, earning a sharp gasp from Tom. "Please," Tom begged, but he didn't know what he was pleading for. Philippe started to ease in and out, faster, harder, until he reached a steady pace that Tom could keep up with. He leaned down and started kissing Tom again, his lips never leaving Tom's skin, biting slightly, leaving marks that would last for days. Tom tried grabbing his sheets for purchase, but it wasn't enough, so he held on tight to Philippe, leaving crescent marks from his nails on Philippe's back.

Philippe made sure that Tom came first, before pulling out and letting Tom touch him, chasing his pleasure between Tom's fists, before letting out a cry. Tom kissed him some more, swallowing the noises Philippe made as he found his release.

Afterwards, Philippe helped him clean up— wiping Tom’s body with a damp cloth, stealing kisses with each patch of skin in his path. "You're going to be sore tomorrow," Philippe said later, fingers tracing random patterns on Tom's stump, his other hand caressing the knobs of Tom's spine.

"It's already tomorrow," Tom pointed out, glancing at the clock. Three a.m. He closed his eyes and snuggled closer to Philippe, mumbling sweet nothings into his chest. He felt sleepy, but he wanted to stay awake as long as he could. He wanted to register as much of this as possible, the feeling of being held by Philippe for the first time. He placed a hand on Philippe's chest, feeling it rise and fall with every breath he took. Felt Philippe's heartbeat underneath his fingers. A gentle reminder that for now, Philippe was alive.

Philippe took Tom's hand and kissed his fingertips gingerly, his gaze never leaving Tom's face. Tom wanted to prolong into another moment, and another, so he kissed Philippe again.

A long, teary-eyed, silent kiss.

He'd poured his entire heart and soul into it, and so did Philippe.

They both didn't want it to end.

But as with all beginnings, all things must come to an end—and so would this.

 

* * *

 

He woke up to the tune of _Despacito,_ with the sun filtering through the curtains of his bedroom. He reached to his right, expecting Philippe to be there. Nothing. Tom opened his eyes, his vision blurry. He blinked several times, but Philippe's side of the bed was still empty. Perhaps Philippe was in the bathroom, Tom thought groggily. He shut his eyes again, giving himself five more minutes before he would wake up properly.

Half an hour later, Tom opened his eyes again, freshly rested from sleep. Philippe was still nowhere to be seen. Panic began to rise in Tom's gut.

"Philippe?" he called out. No response. He stood up, naked as the day he was born, his muscles sore from last night. He caught his reflection in the mirror. If he had been thoroughly fucked, there was no sign of it. He looked down on the dressing table – Philippe's watch, his wallet, they weren't there. He turned around, looking at the pile of clothes on the floor. It was all Tom’s.

He got dressed haphazardly, not even bothering with his prosthetic leg – opting for his crutches, instead. Tom burst out of his room and called out for his mom. "Mom, have you seen Philippe?" he asked, acutely aware of his uncharacteristic high-pitched voice, out of fear and sheer panic.

His mom was in the sitting room, watching early morning cartoons with Harry. "Who's Philippe?" his mom asked, confused. "Don't tell me you brought some strange men home last night, Tom. I raised you to be better than that," his mom said.

Tom's heart stopped.

 _This couldn't_ _be happening._

_Not now._

He ran out of the flat and knocked on Mrs Khan's door. Asked her if she had ever met a Frenchman _'about yea tall, with curly dark hair and green eyes.'_ She said no. Tom's face paled, fingers cold, heart filled with dread. He returned to his flat and checked the kitchen cabinets. The curry powder stock that Philippe had received from Mrs Khan was gone, too.

_Fuck._

From the sitting room he could hear his mom asking him if he was okay, but Tom ignored her.

He went back to his room and slammed the door, having little care for whomever who might thought that it was rude. He checked the date on his phone. It was July. It was the right day, the right time, but the wrong universe. One where no one knew where Philippe was.

 _Who_ he was.

Tom still worked at Starbucks— this he knew, because Iona had texted him, asking where the hell he was for the opening shift. Shaking, he replied that he was feeling unwell and hit ‘send’. D and V, he lied. That should shut her up. No one wanted a sick barista coming to work, spreading infection everywhere.

Afterwards, Tom frantically went through his phone contacts, list of calls and texts. Philippe's name wasn't there. _Don't cry don't cry don't cry_ he told himself, but the tears welled up anyway. Everything concerning Philippe was gone, his number, his witty texts. Even their goofy selfies, taken only last night at Barry’s pub.

The _Le Petit Prince_ book left last night on the bedside table was gone, too.

He searched for Philippe's possessions— his razor and toothbrush in the bathroom, his clothes in the closet, his uniform in the Tesco carrier bag. Nothing was there. There was no sign of Philippe or his belongings anywhere in this room, as if some time in the middle of the night Philippe had fled.

It wasn't even as though Philippe had left him.

It was as if he had never existed.

For a moment Tom thought that he had just woken up from a long, disorientating, vivid dream. That he had never met Philippe. That he was never in Dover. That he had never broken up with Claire.

And then, his gaze flickered to the piece of metal next to his laptop.

The Gibson dogtags.

A stern reminder that he was still sane, that he hadn’t conjured up Philippe like a cheap magic trick.

_God, what are you trying to tell me to do?_

His crutches fell to the floor, the sound an ugly thud in his ears. Tom didn’t know how to feel, how to react. How would one mourn if the tragedy never happened? He looked around in vain— Philippe’s side of the bed was unslept in, his pillows unused. Tom traced the patterns on the pillow, leaned down to breathe into the fabric – as if he would find Philippe’s scent there.

There was nothing, except the cloying scent of lavender, of fabric softener and Febreze.

He threw his phone on the mattress, willing the familiar ache in his chest to go away, but it only built and built. Until he no longer could hold the tide.

Until he broke into ugly sobs that quaked his entire body.

His tears stained the pillow, having no care for shame or dignity. He clutched the dogtags like a rosary, counting every bead on the chain as if the effort would bring Philippe back. Tom curled up on the bed, kept on holding on to his blankets—the same blanket he had shared with Philippe many nights before, as if it was his own dear life. His breaths stuttering with each peak and trough of his sobs, and cried himself to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Tom woke up again a few hours later, eyelids sticking from dried tears. He rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, struggling to shift a blinding headache. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, until he realized that he was still in his room. Everything was the same. His curtains were the same mustard colour, his bedsheets were still chequered blue.

But Philippe was truly gone.

He realized that he could not move on like this. He wondered if this was how Tommy felt, once it sank in that Philippe was gone forever. That whatever they’d shared, no matter how brief, had amounted to nothing. How would one grieve in a situation like this? There was no corpse, no memento of memories shared, no one who remembered. If Tom were to persist in saying that Philippe had existed, they would deem him delusional. He had to persevere alone, had to accept his loss.

Like it was all a fleeting dream.

So Tom soldiered on alone, with Gibson’s dogtags around his neck.

 

* * *

 

A few months had passed. Tom had been promoted as senior barista. The pay was better. Every fleeting second he would make sure that the dogtags were still around his neck. A constant reminder that he hadn't imagined things. That he really had met Gibson. Philippe. Whatever the son of a bitch's name was.

He kept up with his best smile, offering hellos and goodbyes to each customer – they’d named him employee of the month for four months in a row. If he couldn’t grieve, he’d channel his frustrations elsewhere. Smile until his cheeks hurt. Let them think that he was happy, never letting his sorrows show.

He’d whistle French tunes under his breath while he mopped the floors during closing shifts. He’d smile at each customer, hoping that when he lifted his head from the till it would be Philippe’s face that he saw. He spent more time with his mother, took Harry to the Transport Museum at the weekends, helped his little brother with his French homework. He cleaned his bedroom without being harangued by his mom, much to her delighted surprise. Made dinner for the family, tried his hand at cooking French cuisine.

Tom still met up Barry every fortnight, the older man asking him if he’d like to work at his pub. Tom had politely declined. People who knew him wondered why he’d turned into a Francophile, suddenly. Why was he suddenly interested in Politics, in reading up on things that usually wouldn’t have piqued his interest?

He fed Mrs Khan’s cat; helped her tend to her curry leaves. He’d started to speak to Claire again and apologised for being an arsehole. She told him that he seemed happier, healthier. Little did she know.

At night he still wept for Philippe, but that was a part of him that others didn’t need to see.

He’d spent time reading more about Dunkirk. Did his own research in his free time, like a small history side project. Saved up money for a trip to France. Barry wondered why of all places he wanted to visit, it would be Dunkirk? Other people would go to Paris. Visit Disneyland or the Eiffel Tower. It was in remembrance of his Uncle Tommy, Tom explained. He couldn't tell Barry about Philippe. About the memories he’d had, about how Philippe had performed in his pub, how Barry had stood and clapped when the songs ended.

Even so, he didn't know what he would find once he reached Dunkirk. It wasn't a touristy beach. It was another sleepy coastal town, with a tragedy attached to its name. He wouldn't even know where to start looking, or what to look for. He was driven by pure sentiment.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _"I_ _did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him...the land of tears is so mysterious."_
> 
> \- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

 

 

Tom found himself at a precipice.

When Philippe promised him that he would take Tom to France, this was not how he pictured it would be.

The famed Dunkirk beach was empty, save for a raven picking at litter; a torn polystyrene cup against the sands and sea-ware.

“Hey,” Tom shouted at the raven. “Have you ever seen a dead bloke around here? His name’s Philippe. Gibson. Whatever,” he spat bitterly. “5’9”, curly dark hair, green eyes. If you ever see him, tell him he’s a little fucker.”

The raven tilted its head as if it understood Tom, before flying away.

Tom let out a wry snort. “Bastard can’t even commit to being dead, or undead. Fucking Frog.”

He continued to stand at the edge of the waters, waves splashing gently against his trainers. If he jumped now, into the oceans, would he be saved and found? Would it hurt more, or less? To be suffocated, water in his lungs, unable to breathe? He thought of Gibson dying this way, and the thought made him shudder.

Tom carefully made his way back inland, shivering slightly as a sudden gust of wind blew across his face, throwing the hood of his coat, almost tugging him backwards. He saw small boats float past in the distance, but none of them were the Moonstone. He was grasping for memories that were never there.

He walked down the streets, where cafes put up signs and menus, welcoming sojourning travellers like him, offering cool shades in the sticky heat. There was nothing here but faceless strangers and a sense of false tranquillity. Tom wanted to scream but his voice wouldn't come out. Stuck in his throat, like Philippe was stuck in those chains, shouting for help that never came.

 _Please,_ he begged to no one in particular, as he fell to the ground in a quiet alley. Away from the main roads where no one would see him. _Please, just tell me what I have to do._

_Why did you send him to me, God, if all you wanted me to do is suffer?_

He clutched at his dogtags, and sobbed, and sobbed.

Tom might have tugged at the chains too hard, because it suddenly broke, with a little clink.

Time seemed to stop for a moment, then two.

Then the ground opened up, before swallowing him whole.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”_
> 
> \- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

 

 

Tom opened his eyes, his surroundings the same – but something felt off.

The streets were quieter. Broken glass on the ground. His clothes felt heavier. He looked around. A young soldier crouching at a water pipe, catching precious droplets of water from the end of the hose.

He caught his reflection in the broken shop window. He still looked like Tom, but he was in combat gear. A long great coat to hide his skinny arse. He looked pale, emaciated. There was no piercing in his left ear.  In a small moment of peace, he tugged at his dogtags and read what it said.

_Blackford, T._

A half-burnt newspaper page flew by, Tom caught it ungracefully.

 _28 Mai 1940,_ it read.

 _How did I get here? This couldn_ ' _t be._

Hundreds of German propaganda posters fell across the streets, kissing the ground gingerly. A shower of paper-rain, like autumn leaves. WE SURROUND YOU, the garish letters spelled out, ominous arrows pointing towards Dunkirk beach. He kept one in his pocket, as if it would be souvenir for later.

A flurry of German bullets whizzed past, instantly killing the other soldiers. Alarmed, Tom ran and ran until his legs turned to jelly, until his lungs were devoid of air. Until he encountered a group of French soldiers behind a barricade, bidding him _bon voyage._ The beach was in front of him, soldiers lining up, black shadows against the white of the sands. From where he stood, they looked like toy soldiers, scattered in a diorama. But it wasn’t.

This was real.

This was the Dunkirk evacuation.

Tom didn’t know where to go – he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t supposed to be here. At the same time, he was reminded of what great-uncle Tommy had written about today. He was a lone soldier. His entire platoon had been killed within seconds of each other. He couldn’t even begin to find his regiment on this vast, godforsaken beach.

Instead of walking forward, Tom turned right. Away from the mole.  Away from the anxiety-inducing sight. He slumped against the sand dunes. In another life, in another time, this would have been a pretty town. Not today.

In the corner of his eyes, he caught sight of someone digging – or rather, burying a dead body. He walked up towards the man, who initially eyed him suspiciously, before handing out a friendly flask of water. There was a decaying foot in the sand, but Tom ignored it.

Instead, he watched as “Gibson” tightened the laces on his new pair of boots.

 _I found you,_ he thought.

But Philippe didn’t recognize Tom.

In this lifetime, Philippe had yet to die. He had never met Tom before. Or Tommy, for that matter. This was supposed to be their first meeting on the beach, only it wasn’t with his great-uncle Tommy, but with Tom Blackford of Tooting. Tom Blackford, who was born in 1997 and now stranded on Dunkirk beach in 1940.

This was history repeating itself, Tom realized, like a distorted version of Groundhog Day, except this was a matter of life and death.

He understood that war meant survival, and a sudden chill ran down his spine. What if his presence here had altered the entire course of time-space continuum? What if saving one man today caused the death of another? What if it cost them the war? What if the fate of the future depended on him leaving Philippe drowning in the trawler, trapped by chains, lost to the world with no one knowing and remembering his real name?

But Tom knew that Philippe had been sent to the future, to him in Dover, for a reason.

That was why Tom was sent back to Dunkirk now.

And that was to make things right.

For his great-uncle Tommy, whose perceived failure to save Gibson caused years of regret. For Gibson – for Philippe, for the ending that he deserved.

For him to live.

Everything else comes second.

“Philippe,” he said in dire desperation. “I know your name. You told me. You’ve met me before – you met my uncle, and then you met me. I’m here to save your life. We need to get off this beach, but that ship is not the answer. She’s going to sink. German planes are going to sink her. Please, Philippe.”

Gibson – _no, Philippe_ – this man in front of him only managed to stare blankly in return.

 _“Le nom de votre sœur est Claudette.”_   Your sister’s name is Claudette, Tom said.

With each sentence Tom spoke, Philippe took a step backwards. Fear and confusion in his eyes, as if Tom was the incarnation of the enemy, or the Devil himself. Not that it deterred Tom from pacing forward.

 _“Vous habitiez à Amiens jusqu'à ce que la guerre commence.”_ You lived in Amiens until the war started.

 _“S'il vous plaît. Je sais tout de vous.”_ Please, I know everything about you.

 _Je t’aime,_ Tom wanted to add, but this wasn’t the time or place. 

 _“Qui es-tu?”_ Philippe asked, rifle pointed towards Tom, causing the latter to raise his hands in surrender.

 _“Un ami,”_ Tom replied. “Please, trust me. _Fais moi confiance.”_

Philippe’s nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed. Wary of this English intruder who suddenly claimed that he’d known him. Philippe wouldn’t be in his right mind if he’d suddenly trusted Tom – but desperation called for desperate measures.

“Please let me help you,” Tom pleaded, before the shrill of German airplanes broke the illusion of calmness. Soldiers broke their lines, shooting haplessly at the monstrous beasts in the skies, dropping ordnance without mercy. Philippe dragged Tom down on the ground, lying on their bellies against the sand. When the ordeal was over, they heard a groan –a wounded soldier left for dead on a stretcher, just metres away from where they stood. Tom glanced over to Philippe, then at the ship docking at the pier. He knew what Philippe was thinking.

 _“Ne pas,”_ he held a hand against Philippe’s arm. “That ship is going to sink. _Ce navire la couler,”_ he hissed. Philippe tilted his head in confusion. “But I know what we could do,” Tom said, and tugged on the sleeve of Philippe’s stolen uniform.

They make a run to the pier anyway, waiting for the German dive-bombers to attack again. This was not how he expected the day to go. This was not written in the cards. There was no telling if they would survive. They hid beneath the pier, eavesdropping on the Commander’s conversations with the increasingly anxious Colonel. Churchill was planning to save 40,000 men out of 400,000. Tom knew that this wouldn’t be the case, but Philippe and the rest of the men on the beach didn’t.

The Destroyer would sink, Tom explained to Philippe. _“Le navire va couler,”_ he whispered in garbled French, grabbing Philippe’s wrists as both of them tried to balance themselves on the wooden planks.

_“Comment le sais-tu?”_

“How did I know? I just do,” Tom replied. Within five minutes, they could hear the German planes in the air, ready for another attack. Philippe caught his eyes, alarmed. “You saved his life once. Now I’m saving yours,” Tom said, as the Destroyer began to tilt. Philippe’s eyes widened in disbelief, while Tom returned his glare. "Stop looking at me like that,” Tom told him. He didn’t know if Philippe understood, but he didn’t care.

Men screamed and shouted, while the Commander gave orders to abandon ship. Soldiers in life-jackets jumped into the waters as Tom and Philippe watched helplessly, until one of them started to swim towards them. 

 _This is Alex,_ Tom realized with a pang of irritation. He looked familiar, as if Tom had known him in another life, as if he’d seen his face on billboards, on the sides of buses or on the telly, but he couldn’t quite place where. Whoever Alex was in another life, in the future – it didn’t matter to Tom. He only knew that this was the man who had wrongly accused Philippe of being a German spy and caused the Highlanders to turn against him. Even with this thought, he still held out a hand to Alex as if on autopilot, helping him up onto the decaying wooden structure.

Despite the Commander’s paternal advice, despite Alex huffing and puffing and calling him an idiot, Tom declined the offer to go on the second destroyer. He implored to Philippe in imperfect French that they stayed out, not to get aboard the second ship which he knew will sink, torpedoed by the Germans. He knew that they would only end up ashore on Dunkirk beach, where they first started.

Because Tommy had written it all out for him, like a prophecy.

They found Alex a day after, stranded and alone, after the lifeboats saved him and brought him back. Tom stopped Philippe from chasing after the Highlanders, although Alex kept shouting at the both of them for being crazy, for not leaping at the first chance of escape. In a perfect world, Alex could have stayed on the beach, away from the trawler, just the three of them waiting for the small boats to arrive. But Alex insisted on leaving, so they let him go. Tom knew better than to explain to Philippe that if they had followed suit, Alex would soon call him out for being silent, accusing him of being a German spy.

Hours passed and the bodies come back. The tide had come in. From the distance he could hear the trawler being shot at by the Germans as target practice. He had explained that this would happen, and Philippe looked at him in astonishment, as if he was a prophet, or an angel, or a devil, or a cross between the three.

A divine intervention.

Instead, they waited for another whaler which led them to a minesweeper off the coast.

Little did Tom realize that this was going to be the same minesweeper that would sink after being dive-bombed. The same minesweeper that would sink and leave an oil spill, causing an inferno across the waters after the German fighter was shot down into the sea by a Spitfire. When they went aboard, Tom thought he had done his duty, that he had changed the future, that he had kept Philippe safe.

He was wrong.

The first blast caused a massive shock – Tom and Philippe looked at each other in recognition of their fates, wordlessly. As if repentance for his past, Philippe pulled Tom’s hand as they jumped off the ill-fated minesweeper. The Spitfire and the Stuka continued to battle in the clouds, chasing each other’s tails. There was another small boat in sight to Tom’s left, and a sinking trawler to his right.

The Moonstone and the Dutch trawler.

Men were screaming. Bombs blasting through deep sea waters, causing shockwaves through the oceans. Planes screeching in the air, fighting for dominance. Tom swam and swam, but he was never going to let Philippe out of his sight.

Not now.

The Moonstone was so close and yet so far. He had to be quick, else the German plane would fall into the oil spill and Tom would end up becoming a drenched toast. His limbs were heavy, his chest struggled to expand against the pressure of the waters around him. He couldn’t see Philippe anywhere – his eyes were stinging from the salt and oil, and for a moment he really thought that this was the end.

A hand grabbed his waist and dragged him across the waters. Heavy-lidded, Tom opened his eyes and realized that he was staring at a blurred image of Philippe, gasping and panting as he swam towards the Moonstone. Above him, the Spitfire had fired square shots into the belly of the German plane, just as he was hauled aboard the Moonstone by a man dressed in a blue RAF uniform. He was Scottish, Tom realized, as the clean-faced pilot switched between bidding them afternoon and looking forlornly at the skies, where his partner was still piloting the Spitfire gracefully, like a dance in the clouds.

There were loud cheers from the oil-covered men who were already on the boat. The Scottish RAF pilot kept muttering ‘Come on, Farrier’ repeatedly under his breath, like a litany. Worry lines etching deeper on the pilot’s forehead despite his partner’s apparent success. Tom had to look away, a familiar kind of hurt rising in his chest. The pain of knowing that you would lose someone, and you were helpless to do anything about it.

Tom didn’t realize he was still holding on to someone’s hand, also covered in slime and oil. He looked up, straight into a pair of sharp green eyes.

Philippe.

Thank God.

He gripped Philippe's hand tighter. There was no way he would let go of him now.

Moments after, they were ordered to move below deck, to give other soldiers more space. On the floor, a young boy’s body was lifelessly laid. The wooden planks were stained crimson from where blood seeped through the head bandage. He could hear the Scottish pilot frantically shouting at the captain – a calm, elderly man – who had to be Mr Dawson, to get the hell away from there as soon as possible. Fire raged across the seas, hell or high water – in this case, both.

Alex was there too, crouching against the body, covering him up with a blanket— but he didn’t realize that Tom was watching him. So he survived too, Tom thought, with some relief. But when Alex finally glanced up, Tom was already looking at someone else. What mattered was that Philippe was here, on this boat.

Philippe’s green eyes were as deep as the waters that would have mercilessly swallowed him whole, but that was in another universe. Philippe was safe now. Tom could feel his stare burning into his skin, aboard the Moonstone where they sat huddled among men with faces covered by oil, as if trying to grasp the meaning of this small victory. As if trying to figure out the ways of witchcraft that Tom had used to predict the future.

Following this, there was no knowing which path would lead to survival. His great-uncle’s accounts all lead up to being towed across a burning sea by the Moonstone; a strong hand gripping his arm firmly as to not let him drown. By that time, Gibson—the other Gibson, in another lifetime, forever ago – he would have gasped his last breath of air, his lungs full of brine. But this Gibson, this man Tom has learnt to know and love, this Philippe – he was still here. Alive and warm, as warm as a human flesh could be despite the chill of their heavy, drenched uniforms sticking to their skin.

Tom didn’t know what he would reap from all of this, at the end of the day. All he needed was the satisfaction that Philippe would survive, that he would cross the channel; that he would finally step on English soil and witness the white cliffs or Dorset with those same green eyes. Philippe deserved this small victory, after saving his great-uncle’s life. He wondered if his uncle ever felt the same way about Philippe, or Gibson – the only name Tommy had ever known him by. Was that why he had felt so guilty? There was no way of knowing, except the reams and reams of pages Tommy had written about his painful regret, as he lay dying in Arnhem sixty-years ago. Tom hadn’t understood the first time he read them. Now he did. How could anyone not sacrifice everything to save this Frenchman, coward or not?

 

* * *

 

Soldiers were lining up to get on the trains, boots against the cobbled streets. Alex hadn’t realized that Tom had scurried away into the darkness, peeling away from the marching soldiers. He had to hide, if only for a moment. He needed to make sense of everything that had happened.

In a small alley beyond the piers of Weymouth, Philippe searched for Tom. This Philippe knew the vaguest of English, but he understood Tom anyway. They didn't need words. One look was enough.

Tom was unsteady on his feet, so Philippe had to hold his hands. His nose was red, cheeks flushed. Even in this life, this lifetime, Philippe would always there, close, only inches apart. From Tom’s vantage point, Philippe engulfed everything in his space, in his view. He continued to watch Tom quietly – a still presence, an anomaly. As if he knew that Tom shouldn’t be here; a man lost in time. As if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t.

“Philippe, why are you looking at me like that?”

Yet the Frenchman refused to say anything.

“Say something,” Tom urged him.

A second ticked by, then two. Tom watches the dip and rise of his Adam’s apple as Philippe swallowed.

Heavy raindrops began to fall and it caught on Tom’s eyelashes. Philippe smoothed them away, his callused thumb against Tom’s eyelid; his hand against the sharp contours of Tom’s face. Tom reached up to clutch Philippe’s hand, and Philippe’s breath visibly hitched.

Tom was rough and rugged, loud and sometimes obnoxious. Philippe was willowy and graceful, unassuming and self-effacing.

He stared up at Philippe, waiting for the inevitable fall. He tilted his head, hesitant – afraid that he was reading this wrong, afraid that Philippe didn’t want this as much as he did.

“Philippe—,” Tom began, and that was all the invitation Philippe needed. He swooped down and caught Tom’s lips with his own. It took a heartbeat before Tom returned his kiss, clutching the lapels of his dungarees, before pulling away, cheeks flushed, biting his lower lip demurely.

 _Fuck,_ Tom thought. _I love him._

_I don’t want to leave._

The train’s approach was loud in their ears, coupled with the loud hollers of men urging soldiers to get aboard. Tom pulled away first, Philippe’s hands still gripping his shoulders tightly. “Come with me,” Tom pleaded.

Philippe shook his head. _I can’t._

 _Come home with me,_ Tom repeated.

 _They’ll find out about me,_ Philippe’s eyes seemed to say. _About you. About us._

In the midst of the noises coming from the main street, Tom could hear Alex’s voice, searching for him. “Tommy? Where are you?”

 _Let me go,_ Philippe's eyes seemed to plead. _Let me go, and I’ll find you._ A soundless promise, but a promise nonetheless.

“Find me,” Tom pleaded. “Find me,” he said, before he ran towards the light, towards the main street, pausing briefly to catch a last glimpse of Philippe’s face.

 _“Merci,”_ Philippe mouthed silently.

Tom nodded, before running towards the train. He got on it just in time as it began to move, as Alex looked on in confusion. As Philippe turned away and ran deeper into the darkness of the night.

Alex started to say something as soon as they found empty seats, but all Tom wanted to do was to cover himself with a blanket and cry himself to sleep. He knew that once he woke up, he would be returned to whence he came from.

_Find me._

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

> _“Goodbye,” said the fox. “Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes…It’s the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important.”_
> 
> \- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

 

 

It felt like a dream.

It was too vivid; it felt as if he was still in his bedroom, on the first morning that Philippe disappeared. Thinking that Tom had lost him, despite the memories, despite forever. It felt as if his heart was all bandaged up and anaesthetised, waiting for his own injuries to heal, a numbed pain. Harry had found him then, in his bed, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what it was. Trying to sooth him in Harry’s own little way, offering him a train set, as if that would help. But Tom didn’t cry.

To be honest Tom couldn’t remember what it felt like. And there was no point remembering.

The sky was still blue. World War III hadn’t erupted. He’d saved Philippe.

Now what?

He leafed through Tommy’s diary – and hung on to every word, every paragraph that had changed from the last time Tom had memorized them. The content had been altered significantly, as Tommy's future had changed. According to the pages, Tommy hadn’t remembered anything about how he escaped Dunkirk, or went aboard the Moonstone, or landed at Weymouth Harbour. The first thing he remembered was waking up on the train, with Alex in front of him, somewhere in Woking. Alex told him that he had saved them all, that he had saved another soldier—a Frenchman named Gibson, but he’d let him go. Alex couldn’t understand why Tommy’s memory had been wiped out, but the doctors told him he was shell-shocked.

Tom found out that it wasn’t until after VE day that Philippe had sought out for his great-uncle, when Tommy's memories finally came crashing back. Memories that were his, but not _quite_ his. As if Tommy was possessed, as if he had a third eye, as if he was a prescient. As if someone from the future had taken over his body and willed him to do things otherwise impossible.

 _‘He looks like someone you wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of, brusque and no-nonsense,’_ Philippe had written to Claudette about Tommy – in perfect English, only a few weeks after he’d found him. ‘ _He was skinny then, skinny now, but it was probably the sadness_ _consuming him from within, making him look gaunter than he should. His attitude seems to oscillate between a brazened fuck-you to being utterly fragile and spaced-out.’_

 _Sounds about right,_ Tom thought.

Tommy still died – but it was long after the war, in a fishing boat accident, in 1965.

Philippe was with him.

 _Died_ with him.

A sinking feeling washed over Tom. A green-eyed monster awakening inside of him. Philippe _found_ Tommy, after all, as short-lived as it was.

They'd found each other. 

His mom told him that there was a case at the Imperial War Museum containing Tommy and Philippe’s belongings. People had assumed that they were best friends, but Tom knew better.

Oh, he knew.

That afternoon he took the Northern line tube to Elephant and Castle, walked in the drizzly rain to the Imperial War Museum, the building looming over him like a remembrance of things past. Another time, he would spent hours lurking and reading the exhibits about World War I on the ground floor, but today he was more interested in a particular exhibit case on the first floor.

It was a tiny case in the grand scheme of things, with small blurbs to accompany the items encased in it. The story of how Private Tommy Blackford escaped Dunkirk with a mysterious “Private Gibson” together on the Moonstone. Tommy’s rifle used in Market Garden. Philippe’s Gibson uniform, worn by a headless mannequin. The 1939 photograph of Philippe and his family, his dad at the piano, his mom with the violin. A young face untarnished by war. Pity they couldn’t hear his voice— his speaking voice, his singing voice.

Moving further, there was an interactive touchpad detailing how Philippe Hugo Guillet returned to France and helped MI6. As one of their many Double Cross agents, he had been a vital instrument in setting up Operations Quicksilver and Fortitude – a diversion from the actual D-Day landings. He’d written books based on his exploits, immortalized through fictional characters, translated into a dozen languages, and received high accolades. Philippe Guillet had effectively joined the ranks of Roald Dahl and John Le Carre. Of spies becoming writers.

Philippe would have been an amazing spy, Tom thought.

He would have been an even more amazing writer.

Tom’s gaze flickered upwards and he had to hold on to the railings, in order to catch his breath, to keep himself steady.

There was a photo of Tommy and Philippe together, next to the Moonstone, in Weymouth Harbour. The footnote stated that it was taken by Peter Dawson in 1951. Mr Dawson’s son.  The fair-haired youth in the red jumper, the one who had mourned his dead friend. Tom felt waves of different emotions rising inside him, all at once.

Immediately Tom knew where he had to go next, to bring him a peace of mind.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _"To want is to lack. That is what it means."_
> 
> \- Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

 

 

Tom watched the boats in the distance; against the backdrop of the cobalt grey skies, a myriad of quirkily painted buildings, and the sea. In the corner of his eyes, he noticed how the seagulls on the coastline were trying to fly against the direction of the wind; their wings flapping helplessly.

He chuckled to himself sardonically. It was almost like a representation of his life. He thought he’d move on, he’d get over Philippe after all this time, but he never could.

He’d wanted to see Weymouth, one more time. Peter Dawson died three years ago, leaving a widow and three children. It only felt like yesterday that they had shook hands, two young men, from different sides of life, serving the same purpose. The Moonstone was no more. She'd made her last voyage in 1987.  

Tom was looking out from the pier when he heard footsteps behind him. “I wonder if you would be able to take a picture,” a voice said, full of mirth and mischief. 

There was nothing humble about the man, at first glance. The way his piercing eyes, aquiline nose, chiselled jaw and almost-elven ears were set on that countenance – he exuded a silent, certain kind of threat Tom couldn’t quite explain. Eerily, the same face also reminded Tom of someone he once knew, but slightly older than what he remembered.

He had relatively longer hair than his past-life’s counterpart, but the curls were unmistakable, and Tom would recognize those green eyes anywhere. His frown lines were deeper, but there was that considerate purse of his lips, the sharpness of his jaw – all the things that were quintessentially _Philippe._

The man caught Tom's eyes and drew a sharp breath.

“You look like him,” the stranger said. It wasn’t something that Tom had expected the man to say. Tom thought he looked like _him_ too; the timbre of his voice tugging on his heartstrings like Philippe’s, but the lilt was all different. 

A soft Welsh accent. But endearing, nonetheless.

“Like who?” Tom asked, although he already knew the answer.

“Like him,” the stranger insisted. “Like my great-uncle’s friend.”

The conversation was severely stilted. They were speaking in English, but it came out all wrong, as if it was translated to a different language, then translated back to English again. There was no obvious cadence, no proper melody. But Tom danced to the rhythm, nonetheless. “You look like him, too,” he said.

“Like who?” the stranger asked, imitating Tom's earlier question.

“Like my great-uncle’s friend,” Tom said. Because it was the truth. 

Two could play at this game.

The perfect stranger reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a book – the first edition of _Le Petit Prince,_ Tom realized in shock. Between the pages, he pulled out a photograph. “They were here,” the stranger said. “At this same spot,” he held the photograph against the backdrop. It must have been Philippe’s copy of the photo of him and Tommy-- the one taken by Peter Dawson, with the Moonstone and the Weymouth pier in the background. Tommy’s copy had been donated to the Imperial War Museum, in a glass case together with his uniform and letters to home.

Tom stood awkwardly, before offering a hand. “I’m Tom,” he said.

“Blackford?” the stranger asked as he accepted the handshake, the bows of his mouth curving up to form a knowing smile. He’d appeared more sophisticated, like he had outdone himself, in the years that Tom had been _indisposed._ It made Tom look so inferior in comparison, with his shark teeth and hooded eyes and sunnier disposition. Tom tried to stay still, shivering when the man pulled his hand away. Trying not to notice how his skin burned where the man’s touch had lingered.

Tom nodded. “Philippe?” he asked, chancing the stranger’s name, as he had Tom's.

“ _Philip_ ,” the Welshman corrected him. “My friends call me Phil,” he explained, before taking another tentative step closer towards Tom. Encroaching on his personal space, bold enough to reach up and wipe a tear that had formed in the corner of Tom’s eye with a calloused thumb. “Phil Gibson,” he said, his name a soft whisper under his breath. Like a little secret. “I’m here on a job, actually. I’m a columnist for _The Guardian._ ”

All the pieces fell into place perfectly.

Of course his last name would be Gibson. Of course he would become a writer. Of course he would work for _The Guardian._

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Gibson,” Tom said, echoing the words he once said to Philippe, in a time that never was. He wondered if Gibson had traversed across time and space, just as he had.

“The world has changed,” Gibson said. “We won. Don’t you see? We won.”

For the first time in forever, Tom would agree. The world had changed for the better, at least in this moment in time, for the both of them.

Time stood still before them. Gibson remembered, just as Tom has always remembered.

“The world has changed,” Tom nodded in agreement. “A little.”

A secret joke, a secret smile now shared between them. He’d only met this man for five minutes, but it already felt like they’ve known each other for five lifetimes and more.

 _"Un peu,"_ Gibson said, making the sign with his fingers. Cheeks tinged pink, as if proud of his little French theatrics. Then, he gave Tom a lopsided smile, conveniently wiping whatever fears he had about this man. It was as if everything was going to be fine; as if Tom’s qualms were completely unjustified.

He wasn’t Philippe, just as Tom wasn’t Tommy, but by God, wasn’t this enough?

Tom closed his eyes. He couldn't explain why. It was probably because he’d prefer to wake up and find that Gibson was gone; so that he’d think that it was all a nice dream, so that it won’t be harder for him to say goodbye when time and space decided to fuck them up again. But when Gibson entwined his fingers with Tom’s, tears began to form in his shut eyes and rolled stubbornly off his cheeks. Gibson wiped them off with his thumb, but still Tom refused to open his eyes. He didn’t even know why he was crying, only he recognized the pain suddenly throbbing in his heart— and maybe it was goodbye, the same feeling he had the day Philippe disappeared from his life, or when he left Philippe in Weymouth to board that train, or when Philippe drowned in the trawler.

It was the same feeling he had on the day he realized that there was something wrong with him but he didn’t know how to fix it and it was only when Philippe was there that somehow it was all _fixed._

 _I’m rambling,_ Tom thought; and then: _I must be growing really old now._

So Tom closed his eyes tighter, but all he could see were those swirling, twinkly dots in the darkness at the back of his eyes – eigengrau; so he gave up and opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was _Gibson._

Gibson, not Philippe.

Gibson, who spread his arms out like peregrine wings and wrapped them around Tom, standing stiff as a Roman pillar; awkward. Tom lifted his heavy arms and patted Gibson’s back, tears burning in his eyes, trying to remember how to return an embrace—and _gosh, I could cry,_ Tom thought in shock. When Gibson finally let go, they parted and Tom felt as if the heavy burden from his heart had disappeared.

They stood there in silence, shoulder to shoulder, watching the sunset.

He could hear Gibson’s sharp intake of breath as he straightened his posture. His gaze was sharp, as if affronted by Tom’s carelessness, before his features softened into what poets might call hope.

_Love._

"You found me," Tom muttered, his fingers reaching out for Gibson’s hand.

There was a pause, then:

"I promised, didn’t I?” Gibson said, before cradling Tom’s head gently to his chest. Tom sobbed— and he sobbed harder when Gibson pressed a gentle kiss on the crown of his head, while Tom clutched at the sleeves of his hoodie. “I’m with you. I’m with you now,” Gibson said. 

“I love you,” Tom rasped in response. "I love you so much."

Gibson met Tom’s gaze and pressed their foreheads together. “I love you too,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotions. _“_ _Je t_ _’_ _aime,_ _”_ he added, for emphasis.

Different words, different languages, but they meant the same thing.

 

* * *

 

Gibson wasn’t Philippe, just as Tom wasn’t Tommy— but it was enough. 

Gibson had found him.

They’d found each other.

This was enough.

 

\--

.end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I would like to reiterate my many thanks to Aneurin Barnard for providing Gibson's French name, and also for being a beautiful human being in general, with a lovely, lovely singing voice in real life.  
> 2) The versions of 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered' and 'L'accordeoniste' that I had in mind while writing this was Samuel Barnett's version from The History Boys film.  
> 3) As you can tell, this was heavily inspired by The Little Prince quotes. I may have gone overboard.  
> 4) Two playlists are available for this fic: 
> 
> part i: https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/incendiarywit/playlist/4to4I5c7rzTtkSQ795YChu 
> 
> part ii: https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/incendiarywit/playlist/4AUsG9G1Ubgmbsy7nSAfPv


End file.
